Posted on: June 14, 2018
gudok
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 1
Poor combat and story
Compared to PoE/Tyranny, this game is no fun. It lacks two major things which made previous two games addictive: combat and story. (-) Combat encounters are so rare that it seems that combat is not part of the game at all. Besides, it is very simple even of hard difficulty. In previous games you had to use some tactics to win: planning sequence of spells, blocking enemies in narrow passages, hit&run. Here you won't need anything of those. Just pause the game once when encounter begins, make some random orders, unpause and watch. (-) The second problem is the lack of the story. Both PoE and Tyranny provided a truly interesting mystery to solve. In PoE2, the plot is virtually non-existent (as far as I can say after five hours of gameplay). Instead your are given long list of side quests. I mean every quest is a side quest. Absence of the story doesn't mean that dialogues became shorter, no. Excessively long dialogues were painful even in PoE1, but in PoE1 you at least had immersive story, and the dialogue was the key to uncover the mystery. Lacking meaningful story, PoE2 brings boredom of reading dialogues to a brand new level. Final problem with the plot is that PoE2 is advertised as a sequel to PoE. In practice, the connection to PoE is only through the names of gods and your companions. If you give them other names, then there nothing will left that will entitle this game to be called a sequel. Treat this game as a standalone title. (+) Major novelty is the ship-based HQ and the map exploration mechanics. The game takes place in vast sea with dozens of islands to explore. Both islands and sea are filled with large number of mini-encounters which require choices to be made. This may vary from simple "loot a ship (with consequences) or leave it alone" to more complicated encounters with many options available depending on your character skills. But no matter how exploration is good, it can't counterweight the lack of combat and story. (+) Graphics is of exceptionally high quality and detail. (-) One more thing that I would like to criticize is the audio. Music is a weird mix of original PoE tracks (they are awesome, but they don't fit PoE2 a single bit) with sea chants of utmost ugliness (luckily, you can disable the latter in settings). Voice acting is unsophisticated. Atop of that, all people are talking in Italian accent, which is annoying. One-two persons would be ok, but not everybody. To summarize, gameplay consists of exploring large map on a ship, encountering a lot of people, reading (actually, skipping) megabytes of dialogues and performing a variety of simple "go here, go there" quests. Lack of decent combat and story made playing this game an unrewarding experience. There is nothing that could hook me. It is just too boring.
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