I have to say the tutorial and first 20 minutes feel exciting, but as soon as I hit that mine shaft, and saw exactly where most of my time is going to be spent, my heart sank a little. Part of the fun of metroidvanias is when you find that crucial new ability that you know can be used in that one place you saw 2 hours ago is supposed to excite you, which sadly I just didn't get from Steamworld Dig 2, my only feeling being a purely utilitarian acceptance that this will be useful to crack a rock in a slightly different way in my inevitable slog downwards. The caves did a decent enough job at turning abilities into a puzzle of coordination, but the excitement is few and far between, with not enough variation to give yourself a feeling of momentum and progression. There are adjoining environments that do give you a feeling of what the game could have been, with labyrinthine tunnels and varied challenges that test your understanding of the mechanics, but most of the game it's just you and that big old tunnel, and the only way is down, down, down.
I'd really like to give it at least one more star, but a json parsing bug has completely ruined my 30+ hours of gameplay time. Hopefully a fan patch can help out these issues as I doubt Owlcat are keeping bugfixes on high priority this late in its lifecycle. That said, I hear the kingdom management completely ruins everything enjoyable about the first half so it's probably best I stop on a high. Genuinely disappointed because there's so much in there to love if it had only focused on delivering a tight, stable, performant CRPG Pathfinder experience without the cruft
A favourite game of mine back when I was younger in an era where game design outside of FPS was yet to be approached as a balance & optimisation problem, but more of a dark art where the definitive player experience was never clear until after the game hit the shelves. As such, Infogrames produced a warts-and-all gem of the now dead third-person genre - admittedly awkward movement and combat, with plenty of backtracking and a lot of getting lost, but the germ of the exploration and storytelling coalescing in a truly engaging atmosphere and a beautiful soundtrack performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra that really sells the intent to bottle all the maximalism and grandiosity of the high-budget action/adventure film into late 90s PC hardware. For a standout cinematic sci-fi adventure in an era still just realising the potential and ubiquity of video games, it's a more than worthy addition to your collection for its price.
