Syberia 2 is the second half of Kate's journey to reach the mythical island and picks up immediately after the first game ended (so obviously you can't jump in here). It's a slightly better version, as Kate feels a little faster to control and the overall presentation and story structure is paced better. The environments continue to look really good and, though mostly static, they contain some very decent art direction. The story and its conclusion is also fairly well done and I've enjoyed my time seeing Kate and Hans' journey across the frozen north. There were also some decent surprises and it felt like a lot more exciting stuff happened compared to the first game. Still, keep your expectations in check. Frankly, I think a movie would work quite well. What continued to annoy me are the absolutely bonkers puzzles. Some of them were okay and easy to figure out, as it's mostly pattern matching, but others were completely insane, with no direction or logic whatsoever. I expect and encourage you to use a guide if you wish to experience this journey, otherwise you'll be stuck in repetitive, slow animations as you trial and error combinations of items with clicking on spots in the static enviornments with very poor indications. Seriously, some puzzles are utterly mad and I've no idea what the devs were smoking when designing them. Overall these first two games represent one tale I'm glad I experienced as there's something innocent, whimsical and quite magical about the cold, yet oddly cosy world of Syberia.
5/10 Okay, so the premise is that I am NOT a typical player of this particular grand strategy genre and if you're here for gameplay and this genre specifically, then look elsewhere, like the Total War games, or just better RTSs out there. This game is below average when it comes to its specific gameplay focus. I was mainly interested in Neocore's take on Arthurian legend, specifically the dark twists they did in 'Knight's Tale', which is technically the third game in this series. I wanted to check out their whole take on it because I was obsessed with Arthurian myth for some time. If you don't care about King Arthur's legend at all, again, look elsewhere. The Good here is the art and the character models. I absolutely **LOVED** the way each of Arthur's knights were portrayed, as some really cool design work went into each of them and they all have individual weapons and such. To truly appreciate this however, it may be a good idea to know who Sir Kay, Sir Gawain, Galahad, Lancelot are, and even more obscure ones like Bedivere, Caradoc or Balin and Balan. The story is also not bad. It's a legendary, almost mythical take on King Arthur's story that includes most of the popular tales of his knights, mixed in with a battle between the new faith of Christianity and the old faith of the Seidhe/Druids. This makes perfect sense and is very intriguing as a premise, but don't expect to find crazy twists here. But the Bad is everything else, from the gameplay systems to the constant crashes and weird difficulty. I just used cheats to get to the finish line frankly, I can't see how else you'd do it but as I said I don't play these sorts of games. Only try it out if you're weirdly obsessed with Arthurian myth like me and want to see some cool art. But if you expect 'fun' go elsewhere.
