Night In the Woods is most famous for its writing and for good reason. It provides one of the single most enthralling, intelligent explorations of the cruelty of capitalism, living with mental health disorders, survival and existential dread, and does so whilst being uneeringly charming, funny, powerful and offbeat. There's not much gameplay challenge that isn't optional, although even the web browser minigame built in to the game itself would be worthy of its own release. Other than that most of the gameplay is found in exploration, discussion and actually meaningful player choices. You literally can't experience everything in a single playthrough or maintain and nurture all of your relationships at once. The presentation, whilst unsophisticated graphically, is elegant, evocative and painstakingly animated to bring the world to life and the soundtrack could well be worth a paragraph of its own but suffice to say, this game is a masterpiece.
A huge bug-list, a horribly unhelpful and counter-intuitive interface/menu system and a worthless multiplayer mode make this albeit expansive and impressive RPG yet another example of what happens when you set your ambitions too high. Troika had a habit of over-promising, underperforming and releasing buggy titles and this is no exception. Worth playing if you have the patience, but you won't likely be coming back often.
but I felt this game was tighter, better balanced and more enjoyable before the expansion. NoTR threw in a (far less populated, less civilized) map to traverse which threw the leveling curve and meant that the game had to be rebalanced to take that in to account. This was done poorly and made exploring the game early on an object lesson in helplessness. This tends to break immersion and lead to frustrations, and for the life of me I can't say that the added content is that worth it. You don't get to do much other than bicker with pirates, kill more Orcs and go dungeon-crawling in a couple of really minor, claustrophobic places. It's still a worthwhile game, my advice is simply to get vanilla Gothic 2.
You'll have a whole load of fun with this game. This is Flat-Out's destructible environments and well thought-out upgrade system before the handling and environments became boring and toned-down for the sequels. Those who are used to Flat Out 2 and beyond might have a hard time hanging on to the car but you'll get in to it, the real challenge is in driving here. It's not particularly hard for a sim veteran like myself but it's nuanced enough, at least, that driving a fast lap or getting a good side-swipe or pit on an opponent feels rewarding. Flat Out 2 has its qualities, of course, and the mayhem was turned up to 11 but it lost that rallying feel and sense of actual vulnerability that made avoiding that stump/rock/barrier/opponent so much more rewarding.
No, don't read another review, buy this game. Play it single-player, then play it multiplayer or go all-out, get all the Baldur's Gate titles and play it Mplayer via the Baldur's Gate Trilogy mod. Do it. Now.
But the first few hours are the only good thing going. When you realize how limited the world is and how little freedom you're given it starts to become a slog. The first 1/4 or so is very entertaining and promising but you can't help but feel the developers ran out of time, money or interest in this project and the last 3/4 feel more and more like laborious padding.
