A Grand ol taste of Older edition 40k in all it's glory, replete with inexplicable survival of certain units due to a lucky Armor save/FNP, before tabletop simulator granted us access to 40k on a convenient PC bed, we had Final Liberation. It is really good but it is first and foremost a tabletop game, so luck of the dice is at play as much as tactics is, be prepared for the occasional casualty to (Of all things) basic lasguns or ork shootas.
From its highly adaptable Energy-Rerouting System (allowing you to tune your shieldings according to your needs, or to bump that freed up energy into weapons Systems or Engines) To it's utterly amazing Story and atmosphere Freespace 2 is nothing short of memorable and replayable, especially considering the V A S T amount of community made custom campaigns.
I can appreciate having the option to play in windowed mode, however if the game is not the currently selected tab your button inputs should not be registering, I was tabbed onto something else and it still registered my inputs while i neither heard it (I had my headphones off and there was a tab ontop). As a result I have lost all my progress, having thus wasted an entire day's worth of progress because the game was still reading my input. 1 star. I am giving it one star because windowed or fullscreen the game shouldn't be reading your inputs while you're not actually on the game itself, I shouldn't have to close the game when tabbed out just to be sure i'm not winding up eradicating my save-data. Which is a shame as the art-style is gorgeous and the new weapons aesthetics look amazing. However I cannot condone really a game which will still register your inputs even when you're tabbed out doing something else like checking your email, responding to discord messages etc. However compared to Blasphemous 1 which had relatively easy to understand areas of where you can or can't reach, which needed a new ability, the locking of certain areas in blasphemous 2 to one of the three starting weapons means that every zone will have something to back track to everytime you get a new weapon and as a result you can't really scan the map to see where you ACTUALLY need to backtrack to. Enjoy either constantly backtracking or having to make for yourself a map symbol code for what obstacles are in what room, because Vinewalls (Mea Culpa 2.0 Sword) Mercury Platforms (Mace/Flail) and Mirrors (Rapier) don't get automatically marked nor is there a symbol for them. If Blasphemous 1's backtracking was irksome for you, this is 100% worse especially as unlike in Blasphemous 1 where you could Tear grind to donate enough to earn a fast travel system in this you'll have to strike any wall that looks remotely suspicious hoping to find the sisters you need to unlock it.
TL;DR - Rather Boring Story (For all His 'Reminiscence' of the past and the five chapters I've completed before deciding this isn't a game for me, we don't actually get to see that past, and the enemies are bland and personality-less even for the corrupted who HAVE a semblance of their old selves.), the gameplay is essentially solitaire charged turn based combat with deck manipulation cards. The Reason I give this a one star is because unless permadeath means no restarting hands, combat becomes this boring mess of savescumming as Restarting Hand until you can get an optimal combo going is incredibly viable, and sure you can argue it isn't how the game was meant to be played buuuut it is there as an option. I also give it this rating as quite frankly the story tries to give us this "Pity the enemy" feeling, despite the fact that a vast majority of the enemies dont actually display any personality, nor does the character seem to know or talk to them. The Mage thus comes off incredibly one note and stale, with the only noteworthy bits of personality being when he is in a non-battle stage remarking on the beauty of nature and his loneliness, a shame these stages don't actually have too charming a view nor any form of communing with world spirits or such.
