What do we love in our RPGs? - Memorable Characters and Story? - Exciting and engaging quests? - A vast, intricate, vibrant, highly detailed and/or original world? - Fun and complex character advancement? Gothic 2 has none of these. The voice acting is atrocious. Characters, including your own name brand store bought prefabricated generic guy are all made of cardboard. The world is... yuck. Even duller than stock medieval fantasy in approx 6 shades of brown. WTF quests with wtf progression and wtf solutions with barely even any pretense and no pay out. Character advancement is an offensively simplistic slog. Your development can't even be measured. It basically amounts to maybe attack animations playing out a half second faster. The story is nothing but a baseless fetch-and-grab played out for endless hours on repeat. There is no world lore. You can't even say there's not anything original because there isn't any world building at all. The combat is senselessly difficult to the point where the devs are in serious danger of making people think they're compensating for some sort of deficiency. One Star Out of Five? NO Star out of anything. ZERO enjoyment factor. BAD GAME.
This game simply does not function. The UI frequently breaks down and becomes unresponsive. The companion AI is atrociously designed. The game needlessly features three separate control modes and all of them possess the same dodgy imprecise movement and obtuse camera. The game lacks basic user options that might have done something to make the camera and controls somewhat workable. Bugs and glitches abound. The combat is pathetically simple. 90% of this game's challenge is in fussing with the obtuse camera, babysitting your obstinate and suicidal companions, and reloading or restarting when glitches occur or parts of the UI stop responding. The only good thing I can say about NWN2 is that the companions were somewhat entertaining. Sad, the NPCs deserve better than this inexcusable broken mess of a product. BUYER BEWARE!! You Are Purchasing A Broken Product
I can't speak for the multiplayer, so I won't. But for everything else there's a basically serviceable shooter here. And just barely. I mean, the mechanics are sound. When you center your screen on the thing you want to make dead and click on it enough times it disappears. But this is as much as SWB has going for it. The only animation enemies have for being shot is to do this weird twerking animation. The campaign is a joke. There are moments that are just absurdly stupidly hard. The friendly AI bots have two settings: "full moron" and "chill out I got this." I was hoping the campaign would cast me as any one of the games 4 factions but you're stuck with this 501st clone/stormtrooper battalion. The campaign is also short and uninspired. Levels are straightforward. Play balancing is completely nonexistent which accounts for the insane difficulty. Conquest is an interesting feature for a while until you realize it's nothing but infinite space battles/ctf and nothing in the way of tactics or strategy when it comes to conquesting planets. Space battles are by far the most fun I've had and account for an entire star added to this review score but even they consist of the same thing over and over again. But controls are super smooth and mechanics are functional and balanced. Plus you get to fly and shoot at all your favorite star wars spaceships which is rad. Available classes severely limit your options. They all follow the same template for every faction and are basically different weapon selections since weapons are classlocked. I only ever played as the basic soldier with the assault rifle because every other weapon seemed broken/lackluster. Even though you can set up your own custom battles SWBII doesn't offer enough variety to be interesting playing on your own.
