I completed this game in one sitting in 12½ hours and it had cool moments, but I don't think I was part of the target audience. Unique experience nonetheless and I feel like you could go into this without playing Beneath A Steel Sky as you're eased into the story, but at the end of it the references to BASS1 really amps up.
I just started the game and I'm impressed. It's absolutely beatiful, I like the voice acting, the script seems good until now. I think this game is very underrated and well worth its price. I played Beneath a Steel Sky a couple of times and I had high expectations about this sequel, it does not disappoint me. Besides, I think this successor has a much more friendly beginning.
I wasn't a huge fan of the original BASS, though I did enjoy it. It felt like it had a lot of missed potential and was just too short and shallow. This unlikely sequel gives me all I could have hoped for, and in many ways is a worthy successor to the original. The mix of serious plot and humor is very familiar, the characters are true to the originals or are lively new additions, and the gameplay is much improved over the original's doing stuff without any clear reason beyond seeing a puzzle that needs solving, then getting stuck because the game expects you to use a random item on something without knowing why. I didn't use the built-in hint system at all, but the game itself gives you more than enough idea what you need to do next. The puzzles aren't very hard but are enjoyable to solve, and there's loads of amusing dialogue and interesting backstory- the world feels very immersive and consistent.
The first game, despite the humor, had a very grim, filthy, even bloody tone overall, and this one feels much lighter, but much of this is justified by the plot, and the many parts of the game that call back to the original at least feel like they could have come from that game, even if they're now out of context. I did miss some of that grittiness, but it's not impossible to believe that Union City has changed dramatically as a result of the player's actions in the first game, and that all the darkness is of a very different, subtler flavor this time around- taking it any further than they did would have made the villain's motives implausible for various reasons.
The game looks magnificent, with bright, colorful, detailed animated-style rendering, a well-designed game world, expressive characters and some breathtaking vistas of the city. It doesn't have very much replay value, as is typical for adventure games, but it's amazing a sequel was made at all after so long, let alone a good one. Is it too much to hope that a third game may one day exist?
Modern point-and-click adventure game.
Good interface for interacting with things and using stuff in your inventory. A lot of the puzzles revolved around a mini-puzzle using a "diagnostic tool" that allowed for "re-programming" stuff in the environment around you. Well executed.
Good story. Nice little twist at the end.