I read some of the reviews for this game before I played it and it gave me the impression that this was a step down from Dragonfall, but it really isn't. Mechanically, there have been improvements that are very welcome. Having played through it, including the epilogue campaign, I have no idea what there would be to not like. You're thrust ass-forward into the shadows due to a mystery involving your foster father. The characters, locations and plot have all the charm of the previous game and then some. Even in brief interactions with NPCs it doesn't feel like time wasted. The plot is fairly complex and it gets you invested. Though one thing that bothered me was Duncan. Throughout the story he feels like a sour note on the fun you're having as a shadowrunner. As a character, he's well-written, but his disdain for what you're both going through is apparent and doesn't change right up until the end. The rest of the main cast is a delight however, and the only thing that pissed me off is the game doesn't offer you the option to romance any of them. I loved my team of shadowrunners and would gladly have gotten together with any of them. I played through the bonus campaign as well, which acts as a sort of epilogue which deals with some of the unresolved threads of the main story. The ending is somewhat disappointing however. I won't spoil too much but basically, you get presented with two choices and throughout the bonus campaign you have little to no opportunity to influence the outcome of either in the way you do in the main story. You have to choose between the team of characters you've spent the entire game with and Duncan. He is again, a sour note with a grim determination to hate his time spent with the rest of you and if you cared for him at all there's no option to have a middle ground that would make your whole team happy.
Fallout 2 is by far the greatest FO game. I have forgiven it the clunky interface, the occasional crash, the slow turn-based combat. None of these could be enough to ruin the writing, which is up there with Planescape Torment and the original Deus Ex, if not better. Not a single quest is a waste of time, not a single conversation boring, not a single minute spent wondering what to do, only which one of the dozen or so things on my checklist to do first. If you're the kind of person who can't suffer the graphics and use your imagination, then fuck off. If you can't handle writing more complex than "Press F to pay respects" then fuck off. For everyone else, this is one of the funniest, most poignant and darkest games I've ever played. It's so fulfilling and draining at the same time that I'll need a break from RPGs for a bit once I finish it. This is a proper role-playing game. I love it. If my profile says I've played 0 hours of it, that's probably because I'm using the FO2 Restoration Patch, so it doesn't track a modded executable, but which I recommend as a must for the first playthrough, and every subsequent other..
