Lost Horizon 2

Solid game with detailed graphics and easy gameplay. Point and click adventure with some manageable action sequences. A nice pass-time "made in Germany" but not 100% up to the international top level games.

First of all: if this game was labelled as Lost Horizon 1, it would have been passable and then LH2 (which in fact came first) would have been an even more pleasant experience. If anyone wants to try both games, I strongly suggest starting with this one. Then you would give yourself a chance to experience progressive development. If you have already played LH1, you better not touch this. I find it near incredible how a development team could screw a near perfect game like LH1 like this. I am totally puzzled.

...even though Germans are such adventure games junkies that they keep churning them out at a frantic rate. Unfortunately, quality is tanked in the process. Let's see... we have a story that is both verbose and riddled with ellipses, not to mention boring and unoriginal, a particular level is prone to CTD, the music in the final cutscene rips off Jeremy Soule's best known composition, the game is fairly short, the characters' psychology may have been drawn up by a scatterbrained teenager, specific scenes from some movies are obvious "inspirations" for some plot lines, etc... But seriously, more time and discipline would have allowed for a decent game.

If the Lost Horizon 1 was like IJ trilogy, LH2 is like the Kingdom of Crystal Skull. Both take us to the Cold War era, both portray older, less charming protagonists with children they don't quite get along, both swap n-zis for KGB agents as enemies. and both don't grow up to their predecessors' quality. Story is so-so. Adventure with involves Norse mythology and substance which could be "life-giving" or "Ragnarok", bad guys want to obtain. Very similar to "Valhalla Prophecy" by McDermott. The last chapter seems to be heavily inspired by The Last Crusade. Fenton lost all his charm since LH1. Anna is OK but Gwen is just plain boring. And there's no sight of Kim (nor explanation of her absence). I really liked KGB woman as the antagonist. Visuals are fine, music really good, although the final track is taking inspiration with Jeremy Soule's music a bit too far, nearly into the plagiarism territory. The game is a hodgepodge of many ideas, as if developers wanted to throw in everything what was popular at the time. We need to turn keys etc. "manually" like in Amnesia games (nice). We can combine multiple items in a special window, but only sometimes. LH2 has some features you wouldn't want to see in p&c game: stealth sections (very easy, so OK), puzzles on timer (always annoying in p&c) and 1 QTE (easy but needless). The game would probably be better without them. Item based puzzles are mostly fine but sometimes stupid. Who would've guessed that spear shaft (should be strong and rigid) would be a great bow if you pour water on it? Or you have several diamonds in your inventory. Try to use wrong diamond and you'll think can't combine diamond with clothes. Puzzles a bit broken (1 wrong symbol on monks' graves), misleading clues (the grave with map), strangely fiddly (tried correct combination of tiles 4 times, it worked only at 4th time), tedious (puzzle with raven is solved by slowy trying pillars again and again until you find correct combination). Rating 2,5/5.

I also don't like action sequences in adventures. Fortunately, at last here they are rare, short and easy. I had more problems with the puzzles. Often not very intuitive and rather messy and trial and error (lever puzzle like). Also the story begins rather interesting but gets a bit over the top at the end. But: between all this, there are some good parts. In some segment I had fun and I played until the ending - something I cannot say about every adventure game I started. So, if you have no idea for an adventure game you can give this a try, but there are many better option out there (for example Lost Horizon 1, doing everything better with more interesting locations)