The main draw is the puzzles by far. Nothing else has you thinking outside the box like this game. It's a more user-friendly version of the first game, which was already great, without diluting the difficulty. The combat is really frustrating and cheap thanks to having intentionally terrible controls, but the puzzles and graphics make up for it. The art in this game is really pretty. If you're smart enough for a puzzle that's about intepreting clues rather than pushing boxes around, you'll love this game. Just watch out for the trapdoors.
Adds a new mechanic that's not hard, but extremely tedious. Every time you die, your guilt goes up. This shrinks your fervor bar and makes you take more damage, and gives you more money in return which doesn't mean anything because you're about to lose half your money by the point it builds up. You can reduce it by collecting the guilt fragments from where you died, but unlike last time, your fragment doesn't remove all the guilt, and instead you have to go to the confessor every few deaths. This means you're spending your money, when you already lost half of it on the fragment, which is also lost permanently when you use the confessor, on top of the confessor costing money to use. So every few deaths to a boss, even if you always get your fragment back, you'll lose more than half your money. This time your fragment doesn't even spawn outside the arena when you die to a boss, so you're forced to keep reattempting bosses at a disadvantage unless you want to use the confessor and lose even more money. Punishing you for dying is an idiotic idea and I have no idea how the devs who made such an awesome game the first time dropped the ball this hard.
NG+ is cheap. Not hard, cheap. There's a major difference between those things and one is not just a more extreme version of the other. Cheap is when you crank up the damage so you can call the game harder while only putting in 5 seconds of work. Cheap is when you make bosses faster without testing them to make sure they don't have undodgeable attacks. Cheap is making a buggy mess even after a patch to supposedly fix everything. Cheap is punishing you for dying with a tedious mechanic that makes you weaker when you die unless you go farm enemies to pay an NPC to fix you up again. That one was part of the base game, but you'll notice it a lot more now that everything kills you in 1-2 hits. How did they let this one out, seriously? I expected a whole lot more from team17 and the game kitchen and they let us down so hard. Don't buy this, even if you're a fan and you already have the game.
First of all this game was released March 23, 2003, not in 2009, why do they lie? Don't think you're getting an even semi-modern game. Second, there are apparently no MP servers, which was the best part back in 'the day'. But for all that, I'd still give it a cautious recommend for students of FPS history. Novalogic AI was always terrible, but in this game they did their best job of compensating with smart level design. The good levels in this are frenetic, with you are riding in a humvee or blackhawk 'on rails' while bullets and RPGs whiz past you. The design makes up for the pet rock level AI by throwing hordes of enemies at you fast, which actually aligns with the backstory and the idea of you as an elite Delta facing hordes of starving militias with rusty AKs. If you slow down and get close you'll see they are pet rocks, but the missions on rails kind of make it all worth it. Plus the historical foreshadowing - this game was released just months before W invaded Iraq and it all became a sickening reality on TV every night. If you want nice graphics and decent AI you can do much better for the price, but as a piece of history that still has some gameplay value, I'd give it a cautious recommend.
