The continuation of the story where the first part left off. Gameplay is as good, but you are able to move much more smoothly and a number of actions have been added, making you more capable of responding to threats from various sides. The game has been made a lot more difficult, though, and many challenges are more like a puzzle than a freeform shoot-out than the first part, especially on higher skill levels. This is something that you will either like or dislike. The acting is a lot better than in the first part, though there is also still some hammyness in there performance-wise. The setting is still great, as it was in the first installment. All in all, this is a game that - for me - lives up to its potential as a worthy sequal to No Remorse, but it does have level design that is more challenging and if you are not eager to find the secrets, I recommend setting the difficulty setting low.
Featuring great platforming, solid music and fun levels, this game was great - if a bit worse than its predecessor. This game can best be described as the Sonic of PC games and its history is a bit of a reminder of what sort of things started off Epic. The game runs fine without Dosbox, though save often, because memory allocation means it will crash at some point due to windows blocking its access.
Rayman 2 is a great game that has so far stood the test of time. It's got amazing music and atmosphere, a functional story and a bunch of original levels. There are some quirks with its running on modern system, such as some graphic system and copy protection that can act up. If you can stomach these, it is an amazing game and one of the greatest of its kind.
The game is fun, the story is slightly eerie, but it has clearly dated poorly in some respects. The atmosphere and music are intact and the puzzles are generally fun, but sometimes there's just too much wonkiness in the interface. The video in particular is very clearly ancient and sometimes things really don't line up with what the actors are doing or saying. Still, if you can see through that (you'll get the pun when you play this), you can have a lot of fun with the puzzles. Replayability is limited, though it's very possible to miss a lot of things if you don't look around and try to click everywhere. You can even miss entire puzzles.
This game features great graphics, gameplay and an amazing soundtrack. For its time, it was leagues ahead of anything in its genre. Some parts of it aged poorly though. The acting is downright hillariously bad sometimes and the atmosphere breathes 90s in everything there is. Higher difficulty levels become really really difficult because the movement is a bit stiff for a game that expects instant reactions from its player. So if you're willing to overlook these two parts, you will have a great time. I recommend picking either the first or second difficulty for a first time. There are tons of alternate routes and secrets hidden throughout the levels, so you'll still be seeing new things a second or even third time around.
I hesitated a bit before purchasing this game because I was worried it wouldn't be very fun to manage the cult as well as deal with levels at the same time. I was wrong. Fortunately, there are ways to make sure you can safely stay away long enough to clear the levels and the gameplay is a lot of fun.
While I have not yet finished the game (I've only played it for 5 hours or so), I can honestly say that I have been positively surprised by a lot of it so far. First of all, the art style looks great. It's not too modern to venture away from the original and not too old-fashioned to make it detract from the game itself. The voice acting is good enough, though there have been a few "meh" accents around which, in my opinion, don't really fit in with the rest of the world. In terms of gameplay, there is a bit more of a focus on confined puzzles, usually reaching only a few areas instead of sometimes having you cross long amounts of screens like in Beneath a Steel Sky, and there is a hint system that will help out if you get stuck. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to see everything you can work with, which is a part of the 3d-ness of the world and the contact points not always showing up clearly. The general problem of point and click gameplay is there, which is that some obvious solutions are not available. [SPOILER AHEAD]An example: I have to get some flags out of a tree. The obvious answer would be to climb it. Instead, I have to lure a bird into the tree to lure a droid to the tree to then turn sprinklers on and short circuit the droid to get the flags to drop out of the tree. [SPOILER ENDS] Another gameplay thing that is an issue is that Foster, the main character, runs super slow, making it take a while to get around sometimes. Travelling, too, can be a tad slower than I'd like it to be. The game overall is great and has a solid feel to be a sequel to the first, though it has a few drawbacks that leave it from being a five star experience. I can recommend both it and Beneath a Steel Sky (which is available for free if you buy beyond).
The concept of this game is that instead of commanding your heroes directly, they operate on their own. You just offer quests and rewards like a true king. The concept works well, though the game has a bit of an issue in terms of how the difficulty works. The randomness of the units deciding for themselves often leads to invididuals triggering parts of the map too soon, effectively making missions more difficult than they need to be. The gameplay also has a way of becoming rather repetitive if you play too long in a row, but in short bursts the game is excellent, the humor and story are on point and the units are what you'd expect.
This game is a rather interesting mix of several elements. First, there is the great stuff, the gameplay is fun, and makes you as the main character feel powerful. Just a few things you can do: you can fights hordes of orcs at once with your sword, bow, smashing the ground with fire, poison, cursing them and mind-controlling them to fight each other. Powerful orc captains sometimes have immunities and you can choose to kill them or, if you're into that, embarrass them, shame them, let them run for their lives so that when you meet them again, they will remember you. This is the core of the nemesis system that this game takes from its predecessor. A great concept and thousands of lines of orcs saying things. From pissed off to insane jabbering to singing orcs, it's all there. When you capture fortresses and mind-control captains, you can make them fight each other to either become more powerful or to just entertain you, which is fun. Now, the parts of the game that are not good. While the main character Talion has interesting conversations with Celebrimbor, the story is paper thin. It's mostly "I have to take this fortress so that I'm powerful enough to challenge Sauron" and that's pretty much it. There's the usual diversity pandering with a random she-elf that is so much less fun than any of the awesome orcs. The DLCS are equally disappointing. You get to play the uninteresting elf. Yaaay. Then you get to play another side character that was flat and unfun, and oh, by the way it is timed and has no story whatsoever. Why the game designers decided it would be a good idea to play a less fun version of the main character instead of any of the awesome orcs for which they already have an expansive system that affords massive replayability, I will never guess. So, if you prefer a lot of slaughtering orcs in creative ways and having fun, buy this. If you expect any decent Lord of the Rings lore - this is not for you.
I've tried several versions of the windows 10 patches for this game, and while I can get the game to run, the menu text is still not there, not with either of the two patches, nor with a regedit solution suggested in some of the others. I have indeed disabled Vsync. I have tried turning admininstrator mode on as well. Furthermore, the mouse also has a couple of slowdowns/load issues on the map. The game was cheap, but is not playable for me. Sadly, that means I will need to give this a low review.
