Divinity: Original Sin - just not good on consoles

I am an old school gamer and I was there when the D&D games were first being put on PC. I was there when Baulder's Gate absolutely knocked everyone's socks off. I've been there, done that. I genuinely like this sort of game that is referred to as an isometric RPG.

A friend of mine was absolutely adamant that I buy this game for PS4 and he stated that it was his favorite game that he had ever played. I identify with a lot of the likes and dislikes that this friend of mine has so I went and bought it. Thankfully it was very cheap in the PS Store because the game is quite old but well, I didn't make it very far into the game before I gave up.

src

The game starts you out in a usual easy tutorial sort of thing and kind of guides you through the basic controls in an environment that you really can't lose in. You know the drill, almost all games are like this.

It's still a bit fun at this point but you start to realize rather quickly that this game was truly intended to be played on a PC, not a console. The amount of things that you have to pick from in the menus and select on the screen would be a piece of cake with a mouse and keyboard but on a controller this is more effort than it is worth.

It doesn't help at all that the font size of any written dialogue doesn't appear to have changed from PC to console and even though I have a 50+ inch television this still resulted in me needing to stand up and approach the TV just to see what the hell was going on.

The battles and the story was great from what little I played of it, but this doesn't change the fact that this game just isn't conducive to using a controller. There are simply too many options for it to be viable. I have felt that way about other games in the past that were ported later to consoles, one that comes to mind in particular was Prison Architect which was a game that I had on both PC and PS4. I loved it on PC, it was virtually unplayable on PS4.

So while there are probably a lot of people out there that are going to disagree with me about this as far as consoles are concerned I am curious as to whether these naysayers have actually ever played an isometric RPG on PC. If you never knew what it was like to be on the other side I suppose you would be satisfied with it on PS4. To me, this is a game that wasn't really ever optimized for PS4 as far as text is concerned and well, why would they? That would likely take a tremendous amount of work on their part. Enormous menus and tons of items being picked up is quite common on keyboard and mouse games but simply clearing your inventory of "crap" on the PS4 is a chore.

This was a 2 hours or so and done game for me and that is a shame because I am quite certain it is an amazing game. I just don't feel like games like this belongs on a console. Maybe if you have never experienced a game of this sort of PC and you have eagle-like eyesight it could be fun, but for me it was a drag.