Well the game is a wreck. Sadly couldn't even finish it. It was a nice try, but pretty much all features in game are unfinished. There is no depth, no replayability value, no motivation to explore. *Gunfights are pure math, no realism. Enemies either die from one shot, or eat a whole magazine to the head, depending on enemy and gun level. *No custsecenes, no 3rd person, means customization is useless in this game. *Driving felt spongy and unrealistic. *Graphics ar nice at the reach of your hand, but further away... I mean the hell those 2d models are doing in modern games? I thought we are past Wolfenstein 3D technology... *Story is ok, was enough, to force me to finish the game *Sidequests on the other hand, are quite good. Many of them are handcrafted and not generic. *Skills - mosts of the choices in the skill trees are useless. None of them feel gameplay changing. *Crafting - laziest crafting system there is. You got gun lvl 1, then you upgrade it to gun lvl2, etc. No (or much better) crafting system and better balanced guns would make gameplay way more interesting and realistic... *Cut content - no comments here, it's just a shame... *Bugs and glitches - there is only one to say about it. You must be lucky to play 10 minutes straight and won't encounter a bug/glitch... If they keep fixing it, it might be playable by 2077...
Very few reviews mentions the insane differnce of difficulty betweens those two games. Gothic 2 was my first game in the series, played it tenths of times... literally... I know all caves, corners and nooks like a back of my hand. And there is Night of the Raven add-on, which adds a lot of new content, but increases difficulty drastically. So everyone who finds Gothic 2 Gold Edition too difficult, try to get your hands on vanilla game. Game is still a challenge, but not a punishment like NOTR. A few tips to newcomers. I played both games without cheating and with a lit a bit of cheating, I explain why. Gothic 2 is hard at the beginning, but you develope your character much faster. And it isn't really important which faction you choose it's becomes pretty easy in the end. But to rank factions from easiest I would say: 1. Mages (summoning spells are very powerfull) 2. Paladins 3. Mercenaries. But in Gothic 2 NOTR the deck shuffles and rankink looks like that: 1. Paladins 2. Mercenaries 3. Mages. NOTR makes mage faction almost unplayable, and that's where "small" cheat saves the day! As soon as I turn on mana regeneration on reasonable rate, game becomes fun to play as a mage again. You don't need any mods btw. Mana regeneration is integrated in the game, just turned off by default... Playing with sword in hand you don't need any cheats, the games becomes easy enough in any case...
