Eschalon: Book II Impressions

Gear Diary is offering up some impressions of Eschalon: Book II, the latest installment to Basilisk Games’ “old school” RPG series. Since a lot of you no doubt played the first game, here are a few paragraphs on the sequel’s advancements:

But while it is similar to the original, don’t mistake that for meaning there hasn’t been any progress. As mentioned, you can now choose to play as a male or female character, and there have been a whole bunch of visual enhancements including the game now running at 1024 x 768 native resolution. But even within those changes there are a number of usability improvements that make the game even more fun to plow through!

You can now customize the difficulty quite a bit one of the additions was a hunger/thirst meter, and you can switch that off if you don’t want to be constantly worrying about hunger on top of dealing with the trivial issue of staying alive.

When I say ‘˜trivial’ I am being facetious, of course . Eschalon Book 2 maintains the same hardcore combat system as the original. Everything is turn-based, with loads of stat-based action happening all the time. You also have plenty of combat options regardless of what character type you play. Once again it is easier to be a warrior than a mage early on, but it is likely that as you progress things will balance out.