Recent reviews by Woodmaninator

While this game is still very much The Talos Principle, it has a very different approach.

The puzzles that you need to solve in order to complete the game are a little easier than in the first game. This is probably due to the fact that the game just introduces a ♥♥♥♥ ton of new puzzle mechanics and therefore needs to to more introduction puzzles for these. Speaking of puzzle elements - the worst part of the first game (the recording mechanic) is completely gone.

They also completely reworked the stars. They are much more consistent now, however, they might almost be a little too easy now, but at least it is no longer necessary to decipher some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ where you have to figure out at what time the moon landing had happened.

The game also takes a very different approach in terms of the story. While you could pretty much almost entirely ignore the philosophical questions the game throws at you in the first game, the different characters in The Talos Principle 2 almost force you to participate in trying to answer these questions. The characters themselves are great. They all have very defined individual opinions and ideas which makes you like some characters and hate others - which essentially is the entire point of the game.

If you want to complete this game 100% (this includes reading all the texts on the terminals) it will take you about 30 hours.

This might be the worst borderlands experience ever.

The game features an overworld-area that works as a linkage between the different playable areas. I have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue why the areas are not just linked to each other like in previous games but I guess they somehow had to find a way to remove joy from the gameplay experience.

There also is a thing called "encounters" when you travel around in the overworld. These can appear randomly or as part of a quest or as an obstacle to get somewhere. In these encounters you are just placed in a small arena like map where you have to fight off a bunch of enemies. The problem here is that there are only ever 4-5 enemies alive at the same. New enemies only spawn once you kill another enemy. You don't get too much exciting combat action out of them. Oh, and sometimes you have to do SEVEN of these boring encounters in a row. Unfortunately, it is as tedious as it sounds.

The story is horrible. To be honest, the Borderlands franchise is famous for having weak stories and humor that is written by and for 13 year olds, but this game takes that stuff to the next level.

If you ignore all the bad stuff, you might get a mediocre gameplay experience out of this. The guns have many new effects and are different to the ones from BL3, however, most of these new effects just feel terrible to play with so you'll avoid most weapon types in your playthrough anyway. Splendid!

This game is as bad as the DLCs for BL3. Not worth it, not even if it's on sale.

This is one of those games where I wish I could choose a neutral option for the review.

Don't get me wrong. The game is not that bad. It combines a lot of stuff from different genres and it is a little fun to play it (in theory). You have to manage your cult and the combination of different elements has a lot of potential. However, there are so many things that prevent this experience from being really good.

First and most importantly:
There are so many bugs. It is insufferable. I am convinced that the developers could not be bothered with playing the game before they released it. If they had played the release version from start to finish once, they would've noticed so many bugs, but appearently they just didn't. The worst one of these bugs was that quests would reference the wrong NPCs so they did not make any sense anymore. Besides that, a lot of unlockables were simply not possible to unlock due to bugs. I have encountered 10 major bugs (I started counting after the fourth bug) so far and I could not even report them with the in-game bug report system because that also does not work.

Another thing thats pretty lame is the balancing:
You spend most of your time outside of dungeons/crusades. I wish there was more of a focus on that part of the game because the farming/building your cult felt rather easy. The leveling system itself felt also terrible. I had all upgrades in the temple just after finishing the second boss. That felt pretty unsatisfying because for all the other bosses I couldn't really expand on that any further.

The fighting is pretty basic and boring:
There is barely anything that makes the combat interesting. As a long time The Binding of Isaac player I thought that maybe this game could compete as a dungeon crawler. I was so wrong lmao. You have a handful of weapons that are basically almost the same (except for maybe the hammer) and a secondary weapon that also does almost the same every time. The tarot cards (which are like items that buff you) are so incredibly uncreative and boring: you get 1.2x damage, your hits deal poison damage, you get 1.2x attack speed.

There is no endgame content:
Nothing. No reason to continue playing once you kill the final boss and get all the collectibles. Maybe you could decorate your base, but I did not care about that and it is only going to give you another 2 hours of playtime. One playthrough takes no longer than 15-20 hours. However, it is possible to go on crusades and spend more time with that boring combat system.

I know this review is pretty negative so far, but the game is still some fun - for your first playthrough once all the bugs are gone, but that is probably going to take some more time.

The art style is fantastic and the soundtrack is actually incredibly good. If the game didn't look so cute it would not have generated any hype anyway and I assume it would have been a massive failure if that had been the case. So at least the game has that going for it.

TL;DR: This is the best Action-RPG released in 2021. Go play it, especially if you are a fan of Gothic 2 NotR. In addition to that, this game is free, so what are you waiting for.

After finally finishing this game, I just had one thought: Why? Why is this game so good? Why is this game so much better than most or maybe all Triple A titles released nowadays?

I think the developers of The Chronicles of Myrtana just understood the core elements that made Gothic and Gothic 2 so incredibly good and they managed to create a quest filled world that might just be about as big as Gothic 2 NotR. There are some completely new elements that work really well, for example the new cooking system.

The game has an immersive story, amazing world building and - something that very few modern RPGs have - actually meaningful exploration. No matter where you go, you just get a feeling that, for every square meter of this world, someone truly thought about what was the best fit for this place.

Somethings that's also really nice about this Mod is the addition of new enemy variants that, for the most part, look really promising and it's nice to have some tougher types of rats, scavangers, molerats, minecrawlers and so on. The blue Lurkers look a little bit weird though.

Another feature that I really enjoyed is that the world truly changes a lot between chapters. This is something that the original Gothic games did not really do too much. But it feels amazing cause at the start new chapters you can just explore again and you will find stuff that has changed - in addition to more enemies that you can strike down to farm XP.

All in all, this is a must play for all Gothic fans and all fans of Action-RPGs in general.

This is a masterpiece. It obiously is a parody of The Witness and it is a really good one. It captures all the moments you might hate/love The Witness for and just like in The Witness, there is a big surprise around every other corner.

The best part about the game (this is a spoiler about the ending):
You get to draw a ♥♥♥♥ at the end

Pretty terrible game in my opinion. It looks nice but that's about it.

Controls are terrible. Therefore, platforming also feels terrible. The gameplay is just tedious.
In terms of story the game just does not give you much at all and almost no question you might have at the beginning of the game gets answered.

garbage

Incredible story with an incredible sound track by The Living Tombstone!

This game is very open world, but in a different way - in a better way. You can actually do whatever you want. The game does not really guide you. You can get hints (kind of) but this game is all about exploring stuff and figuring it out on your own. The story also is beautiful. 10/10

This is probably one of the best puzzle games I ever played. The puzzles vary in difficulty but they are never too easy nor too hard. Some took me a few different approaches and some time to get right - but hey - it is a puzzle game after all, what do you expect?

The story is kind of interesting but to me it felt like a nice addition. If you do not care about the story at all you still get an amazing puzzle game.