I enjoyed the game, but I can generally agree with a lot of the stuff in the review. There are a few parts that are fairly exaggerated or even flat-out false, though. For example, I agree about the general complaints about the character system, how everything fills a bit samey and how there aren't that many interesting options, but the attributes affect two or three different things and are a bit less straightforward than described. Perception, for instance, also boosts your deflection and reflex defences aside from your interrupt chance, which makes it a potentially very useful attribute, and it might also be the stat that sees the most use in conversations (flavor or not). You also didn't mention chanters, which in my opinion are the most original character class in the game (even though their actual usefulness is debatable).
Also, this part
For example, the health/endurance dichotomy. Having your characters get knocked out in combat instead of dying promotes carelessness, nearly invalidates all healing spells (because they are bad to begin with, and also because they effectively make your character take more damage that ‘counts’ during combat by healing endurance and not health) and completely eliminates the need to manage resources. In the IE games, if you weren’t resting after every fight, you had to carefully consider using every healing potion and spell, and memorise cure spells for poisons, diseases, etc, to manage your global party health reserves. This literally never happens in PoE. All ill effects end after every fight, all endurance regens back to full, all fallen party members rise as if nothing happened.
is dumb, because health is still a resource you need to manage unlike in the IE games where you can rest as much as you want to without any kind of a cost, meaning that long-term resource management is nonexistent save for some extremely rare areas. Sure, you can choose to not abuse the rest mechanic, but it's still available for you every time you run into a tough fight, and you can do the exact same choice in PoE if you want some added challenge. Of course, PoE is so easy and has such a broken economy that camping supplies also become a non-issue very quickly, but this is still one area where the game actually improves on the IE games by adding some kind of a cost to resting, even if it's still not quite enough.
As for the quests, I don't think it's correct to criticize them for being mindless fetch quests when they're rarely about completely mundane stuff (not much errand boy stuff that I remember) and there's some kind of a choice involved in almost all of them. The exceptions are labelled as "tasks", and even those often give you two or three different outcomes. The general structure of the quests is usually fairly linear with some choice thrown in the end, and there really aren't all that many different ways to do them, but if you use the IE games as a reference point, PoE doesn't fare too badly and probably surpasses those games in many areas. There are parts where it gets very stupid and doesn't take into account some obvious ways to do the quests, though, like the Rogue Knight quest that was referred to in the review, or how the alliances are handled.
All in all, it's still a nice review that manages to address all of the major issues in the game. I got what I expected.
