After playing through the first one & a bulk of the second one (as I rented it I've had to learn a lot through gameplay alone) so here's some tips for the people new to this generic yet ambitious action-rpg. It's like Oblivion with a bit more depth & open world crazy jank (mostly seen so far where things will follow you a limited distance & run back to attack again or forget you, creatures spawning on trees or other high spots to shoot at, things stuck in the world making them easy targets, ect.). I guess after playing through as much as I've done, I'm surprised on the amount of depth to it all between the whole world, the crazy crafting system of upgrading a simple weapon into being crazy dangerous, limitless alchemy system so while the game is a bit silly at times or generic, it is entertaining in many places & better than many other RPGs that hit that middle ground of not being awesome yet not hopelessly broken. So give it a try & if so the things below might save you some time on figuring things out.
 

• Firstly, the rogue kinda sucks in this game sad to say. Regardless of the armor set you tend to use, max out the lockpicking as 99.3% of the containers in the game are locked. Archery is useful occasionally in the early parts of the game but overall I stuck with a mix of 70% summoning mage & 30% melee.  Trying to steal from people is the worst minigame I've seen in a while that after maxing out the skill I still can't quite get the handle on. Granted not seeing too many people distracted in the game so best to just sink those points in various magic/melee/crafting/general skills. You get the trap setting ability near the end of chapter1 & haven't found much use for it. If going for the achievement though, you should have some blade traps on you that you can use at rank1 along with some mummies nearby. Just set the trap, let the mummies run into the trap setting it off & collect while running around the room. Takes a little while but after that I just sell off most of the traps I find.
  

• Better summoning elements: power (giant scorpion), stone (stone golem), decay (death knight-favorite for me), poison (skeleton warrior-also favorite). The main reason I picked these is I tend to like necromancy for wizards in other games & tends to work well. Here these summoned creatures will either block just about anything getting to you due to sheer size or with the skeletons/knights will just pummel whatever senseless leaving you to shoot at with homing magic bolts.

• About halfway through I tend to bounce one element bolt (no ricochet or spray btw as it takes up too much mana) & one poison bolt. Putting enough into willpower will get the regen up high enough that it's not hard to constantly shoot magic bolts at something for a while then take a break by resummoning things to get a steady stream of damage. A bulk of what I've run into so far isn't immune to poison and then it tends to be able to be hit with fire/shock/cold okay. 

• Upgrading spells, this is not really explained well for me so it took a while to realize that I could open the spell & add the element or main factor (homing bolt/summon/trap/ect.) multiple times to ramp up the effect. 

• Early on the armor you find from merchants is pretty costly, best to just break everything down in it's components & pick a few things to upgrade through metallurgy (another skill to max out). If you go online for the bonus items (like the dragon armor or the legion axe) in the password section herewhich won't screw up achievements unlike the codes above). Also if you decide to use the password bonus items, be sure to wait to enter them in once you get the first place you can stay & store your things as you can't really use them in the tutorial section and will just take up room on inventory.  

• Music, yes it's like guitar hero on a track highway. Plus there's multiple instruments to go with & found one quest that requires to play a bit of music in them. Well this is a crazy mechanic, maybe because I started with the drum to see what it was going to do in the game which was easy to do with it's slow & steady rate. Try another instrument & OMG it gets crazy (using the triggers & bumpers on the controller for the 4 different notes), you can somehow get money from this but I tend to find musicians out on their own or it's the middle of night when nobody is around. It's easier making money by breaking open locks or selling off the stuff you find.

• Feel free to go crazy with potion making & crafting weapons, sometimes you will get skill points for killing a set number of monsters but also for crafting potions & improving your gear so go nuts with it as I've not found a way yet to determine when you will get those skill points but there's a few skills which make the game a bit easier to deal with.
  

• Lockpicking can get the attention of the guards in the game if you are in town & trying to get into a house, or if in a building & picking a lock with someone nearby you will get a stern reminder of what you're doing or in a few cases where they didn't record the dialogue, a stern look. Crazy though if the person can't see you, is far enough away, if you pick the lock then they show up you can still loot the container without them being a problem. Contrary to this, if you see a potion or skill book out in the open you can pick it up without any problem either. 

• On skillbooks, if selling the extra ones you find, once you get the home in hatmandor there's a vendor a few steps from the front door that buys them for about 1k each in the currency of the game (it's a silly thing I can't remember but it's the easiest vendor to find that does buy them for a good price). Buying them, as they are your special skills in the game, aside from buying one early on (necromancy) the rest have all been fairly easy to find & spread out so as they tend to cost a lot early on it's best to save the money for other things (as the house is quite a lot of money to buy but there's tons of locked containers full of loot inside to sell off or break down for raw components). So buy the house early on once you get there. 

• Outside the slum area of Hatmandor is a person I met earlier on in the game who is building up something in the game & needing money. Investing in whatever he needs will give you lots more money later as well as special armor & other things, by this time too I didn't really have much use for money so had enough to spare. Most of the money I have lately goes to either buying lockpicks or magic/modifier cards as everything else I tend to find out in the wild from enemies or chests.
  

• Way to get farther in the game early on (just beware though as when you die in the game it's time to load something up & in some areas, I spent a while in some spots with summoning the undead army on one guy & shooting them with poison/fire which took a damn long time). From one of the guild quests you go into a home to beat up a bunch of things in a basement (believe they are angry tough fish humanoids), but killing them will give you an ingredient in alchemy for making water walking potions. From the starting island if you ignore the one large island with the solitary castle/tower (close to that small island) & looking at the map you can effectively get to the Asian themed island in chapter2 (which is the other large island northwest of the prime landmass where most of the starting adventure is going on with chapter1). You can probably find a path to a shoreline from the chapter1 island to the chapter2 island quicker but as I wasn't sure what to expect I wound up taking the long route & after running through some of the other small islands, there's really not much anywhere else I've found so far aside from the chapter1 island & the chapter2 island to at least find vendors/teleporters & safe havens. Note on chapter2 island, the town is on the lower west side of the island, you can see the roads on the unexplored map decently enough to shoot for that, the rest of the island is pretty wild with higher level things in it.

• Melee: as I progressed more to this from magic if one on one against something that probably won't kill me that easily plus it took less time than shooting it as the undead army after a while was more of a wall & less killing force. If you make enough healing potions, you can generally take on quite a lot with either two-handed weapon maxed up with metallurgy or one sword/axe & one mace (both 1-handed). If you put enough into the ability to knock things down & critical attacks, you can take out a lot of the enemies in the game. Just be prepared to keep on hand a good 2-handed axe/sword & a mace, same with one handed things. So far I've lots track of the skeletons I've run into in some tombs & other places. So the mace works well here against them, just look at the icons under the names to see what not to use against what you're fighting. Sometimes it's a little experimentation on finding out what does more damage. When fighting the cats especially along with some other wild animals they tend to run off & run back to attack. Best to just block then hit as they are running to you. Melee I'm finally getting figured out though it seems to take forever as you or they will be blocking quite a lot so best to just keep swinging & use special attacks. 

• Sorry can't give any tips on finding the boat to get to act2 island, did find the boat on the act2 island but never used it by that time I had teleporters (natural or personal) going to each island so the boat seemed silly to use more of it but it's a neat thing to have in a game like this.

• Funniest thing in the game is that there's some quests, like killing cyclopes on the beach, where if you use lots of stone golem summoned creatures to put a wall between you & them. While fighting on the beach the cyclops was up on a rock on the shore, the stone golems were hitting it & either knocked it a few steps back or the cyclops took a few steps back. Once it fell in the deeper water, the thing which is 20' tall, couldn't swim & died instantly. Saved me a lot of time fighting the cyclopes when they never learned to swim.

• For the end I'll not spoil it but in the game you find a lot of mummies, who's brains are part in an alchemy formula for resurrection potions, this along with a good stock of potions (healing, mana, resistances) might be enough to finish the single player but you might also need to make use of the black knight's sword (2-handed from a quest blatantly copying the 3rd Indiana Jones film) & the 2-handed mace thing from the 2nd in command of the emperor (can't miss it but it's quite good). I mainly offer this info as you will get to the end fight & you will be unable to save anytime during it so if you get killed you will have start the whole thing over. Also not quite sure how anyone specializing in magic or archery can get through the last fight as there's not a lot of room to move. GLHB!