AoD is not a game that is kind to completionists. If your lock-picking skill is not up to the task, you will not get to see what's behind a door. The same holds for combat, dialogue and other forms of environmental challenges. This difficulty and approach to stat/skill checks requires adjusting to. In most RPGs, a decently built character will be able to beat every combat encounter, charm the crown of every king and steal all the gold in the land.

In AoD, a skilled player might be able to mix two distinct skill sets, but more likely you'll invest everything into a particular method of progress and still occasionally struggle.

For the turn-based combat, this is actually a plus. There are plenty of viable strategies, and, despite being essentially locked into your first choice of weapons and defence (block or dodge) there's plenty of customisability. For the melee weapons, you have daggers that are fast and weak but great with aimed strikes, swords/hammers/axes which can cause bleeding/armour breakage/mini-crits and rounding out the melee weapons there are spears which have high range and can interrupt enemies moving close to you.

For ranged combat, there are bows, crossbows and throwing weapons. Crossbows differ by requiring an action to reload and not scaling with your strength, while throwing weapons are just kind of bad.

Beyond weapons, there's also a decent amount of combat tools and consumables – including crafting and alchemy – to round out your options. Many of these are exceptionally powerful and can easily turn the tide of a whole fight when properly applied.

While in some fights you might wish you had a full party to control instead of AI allies, the combat in AoD is nonetheless excellent and incredibly satisfying once you achieve some level of expertise.