Honestly this felt like such a lazy follow-up to the original. There are some improvements, but for every step forward this game made, it took at least 3 steps back. The AI of enemies and graphical fidelity are all on par with the original game. The graphical fidelity may not have been as much of an issue if this game …
Honestly this felt like such a lazy follow-up to the original. There are some improvements, but for every step forward this game made, it took at least 3 steps back. The AI of enemies and graphical fidelity are all on par with the original game. The graphical fidelity may not have been as much of an issue if this game didn't release 3 years after the original game due to legal mires the development of the game found itself bogged down in. One interesting change is the expedited leveling system. You level up exponentially faster when compared to the original game. This does allow you more access to different spells and makes spending points less of an investment. This is good and bad. On one hand, some wasted points isn't as big of a deal, on the other hand the game still does an incredibly poor job at conveying and explaining what abilities do. You basically either have to look it up online (which is a mixed bag) or just get the ability and experiment.
I played a sorceress in the first game and what felt bad was not getting my "good" spell (lightning orb) until Act 3. I was basically just a worse version of the dwarf relying solely on melee attacks because my spells were terrible. I played the necromancer and his spells in contrast are actually viable. Sure there are still plenty of shitty spells. But haste, slow and enervate are really good. Enervate may be absurdly powerful, but it doesn't feel good to use. This is due to the lazy animation and poor feedback it gives you. You stand firmly in one place, then purple lighting spews out and shocks enemies. That sounds cooler than it feels to play... In act 3 there are optional quests to get more spells/abilities but I honestly didn't find this. I even knew about the quest but I had to talk through specific options to a braindead NPC to get the quest... really shitty because 99% of what NPCs say is useless and poorly written... it got to the point I just started spamming through dialogue because of how asinine and useless the interactions felt... it would have been nice to have gotten my new spells to switch up my monotonous gameplay loop but I wasn't about to restart everything for this...
Another woeful shortcoming of this game when compared to the original is the mindless and poor placement of enemies. In the original game, the AI was abysmally simplistic. Enemies would just run at you with reckless abandonment or shoot at you mindlessly if they had a ranged attack. To compensate for the AI shortcomings, the devs at least had thoughtful enemy placements to emulate more strategic and tactical gameplay from the enemies. They did nothing complex, but placing a bunch of kobolds with arrows along a back wall and forcing you to push a crate to safely take them out was a fun and engaging change to the gameplay loop and effectively made the enemies feel smarter. Hell even just setting up simple barricades of crates and placing archers behind it made for more engaging encounters... none of this is present in the sequel... enemies just run at you with no concern for their own wellbeing. The late game becomes a slog as enemies become increasingly more damage sponges. The boss fights also rarely deviated from run around in a circle and hit them. It's a shame because the framework of the original left it open to expand and explore interesting game mechanics. Such as improved AI and more tactical placements of enemies.
This honestly just felt like a cynical cash cow.
