I don't have nostalgia glasses for this, never played the original. This was clearly made for very young kids. As in, younger than the target audience for most 3D platformers like Mario 64. Everything is explained in detail, everything is very easy. Story is quite basic. It's not bad as a platformer, but unless you do have nostalgia for the original, you won't be blown away.
It's not really perfect, but it's fun to play. Compared to other titles, the normal price tag seems a bit steep tho
It seems to me that this is more of a level set to Pandemonium 1, but I didn't play long to be honest. The problems of part 1 are still here: the camera is so zoomed in that you'll run into enemies unless you have the level memorized or goo at a snails pace. it has a save/load in the main menu but I couldn't figure out how it worked, when I got back to the main menu to save my game was lost, so you'll probably still need to write down passwords (a sign of a bad console port back then). I never played this at the time, so I got no nostalgia glasses, which may have contributed as to why I didn't like it. I would recommend that if you didn't play it when it came out that you get another platformer instead.
This is the best multiplayer shooter there is, right after Unreal Trounament 2004 (which was basically the same plus vehicles. Stay away from UT 2003 and UT 3 tough) The weapons in the game, which is probably the most important aspect of a multiplayer shooter, were just great. Every single weapon (except maybe the ones you spawn with) hat its own unique use, look and handling. You can mow down enemies in the distance with the hit-scan minigan, you can lay short-lived traps (blobs of bio-reactive green goo that sticks to walls and floor) with the bio rifle, you can shoot around corners with the razorblades from the ripper, you can kill groups of close enemies using the hard-to-master shock combo of the shock rifle or you can just go berserk with the rocket launcher that can load up to 7 rockets at once - and that are just some examples, with many more weapons to boot. Another great thing is that you can adjust pretty much everything using mutators (small mods). There are some for new weapons, for new game types, for different physics, for cool effects (like frozt where you freeze players (than can be thawed) instead of killing them or lazy matrix where intense fights trigger slow motion you-can-see-bullets-flying-past-you awesomeness and so on), for... the list goes on The only problem comes from it's age. The default maps aren't that many and aren't that interesting and most fan sites where you could download maps, mods, mutators, skins and models don't exist anymore. Many of the greatest maps only exists on the harddisks of fans but not in the internet anymore. I was among the lucky ones that saved tons of maps and mods away back then instead of just hoping they would be there forever, but for new player, that may be more difficult. Note that there still are some sites where you can get maps and so on, but if you buy this game here, better hurry and backup any downloaded map you like.
If I had to summarize this game in one word, I'd say "hard". I played many RPG games, old and new, but I haven't yet found a single one that was as hard as this game. Either you fight every of the tousands of fights in semi-round based mode by pausing every second, or you will be destroyed. Also, you have to know damn well how to build a party. Mine, after having not played any DnD-Style RPG for years, was utterly destroyed in the first fight there was. I actually had to consult a guide for character creation just to survive the first battle. As an example of the hardness: Later in the game, I got fed up and just enabled a cheat that refils party health on a key combination. In about the last third of the game, I had to do that combo about once a second or my complete party would be dead. Granted, when I was there, I played it more like one would play Diablo, but still. While I enjoyed the story and the scenery, that level of difficulty pretty much destroyed the game. I never played Baldur's Gate, so maybe people familiar with that, like most reviewers here, are adjusted to those levels of difficulties, I don't know. Frankly, I was surprised that pretty much no review mentions the awful difficulty. Imagine playing Diablo 2 with a permanent max of two health points.
