The second had a more touching story but also had more aggravating and immerson-breaking flaws. -A somewhat repetitive stealth game that forces you to directly fight enemies under aggravating circumstances (in a fog where you can't see farther than ten feet but every enemy knows exactly where you are and you'll need to get behind many of them to attack their weaknesses while avoiding the archer who apparently has night-vision goggles -A teenage heroine who can take on veteran soldiers head on by the power of her magic sling shot -NPCs that you might like, but they won't last long -Idiotic levels of rats ( literal tidal waves of them) doing impossible things -Inconsistent game logic when it comes to NPCs. The PC will be safe near fire or atop wagons, rocks or lamp posts, but woe to any NPC who tries the same. In fact, that big stone city of yours will be reduced to dust in seconds by the afore-mentioned giant swarms of rats. Apparently they have a therapist who gets them over their fear of fire, a personal trainer who gave them super-strength, and their teeth and claws are made of adamantium The ending was touching but completely unecessary and made zero sense to me. Maybe it was because at that time I just wanted it to end because the game was constantly killing my immersion. Yes, it's a game, and we all give games a lot of leeway, but I gave leeway to all the things I mentioned above. In spades. And yet it still somehow managed to break through the shaky walls of game realism and annoy me over and over again. I keep thinking about replaying the games again, but know that I'd like the atmosphere, I'd like the people, and then the game would just destroy those over and over again with unbelievable events and unnecessary deaths.
Balanced on a fence? Need to jump off at a precise moment to take out a hard-to-get target? Good luck. Your character will stare at the flat ground two feet below them with terror as you try hopelessly to find the precise pixel that will show the jump option. Meanwhile your opportunity is vanishing, and you'll take to pounding the movement key while moving your mouse around, just hoping that you'll stumble upon that elusive sweet spot. Maybe, you think to yourself, the problem could be solved if you rotate the camera. So you try do so so in a way that will show the character and their target, and those three buildings won't ALWAYS be in the way. But no, now you've lost the opportunity. Similar to the above, good luck throwing bodies off cliffs when you're in a rush.You have 2.5 seconds until the trio of guards' vision cone lights up like a Christmas tree? All you need to do is throw the body and you're golden? Nope. You're screwed. You'll spend about five seconds trying to find the precise location, which looks like every location around you, from which you can throw the body. I guess that makes the characters obsessive compulsives. They have to do things at the precisely correct location. Another irritant? Sure, how about how they repeat the same damn phrases every ten seconds, with only about four or five variants. "An Elegant solution" "How elegant" "Elegantly done" "I will do so. Elegantly". No, that doesn't get tiring at all. Do you love RTS without pauses while you try to use up to 5 characters? You're in luck. You can tell everyone to do an action at the exact same time, but you can't chain actions, and you can't pause to issue new orders, or even pause while lining up their actions. Time keeps marching forward. Enemies are quick-draw artists. In the 0.1 seconds between them spotting you and you killing them with the weapon you are already plunging into their heart they will pull out their gun and shoot you with a marksman's accuracy. Never missing.
It plays and looks and sounds quite a bit like the first. I think they got either all or most of the same voice actors, too. One minor difference I noted was that you used to be able to underpower teleport and digging and sprint powers, but you can't in 3rd Reich. Mission-wise it starts slow, but picks up after a few missions. I especially liked the 40's characters, but at the end of the game... Let's just say that the game makes quite a few characters unavailable in the final missions. It was a major turn-off to me that characters I'd spent the entire time developing - and that I found much more interesting than the rest - were suddenly not available. While there was a reason for it, story-wise, it still annoyed me enough that it took a long long time before I forgave the game enough to play it again.
