Short, but fun, highly recommend giving it a go, just for the fun of it :3

I just finished this game. What a journey! A bit more complicated than the first one, but with tons of quality of life improvements that made the whole experience smoother. I needed at least 6 or 7 attempts to beat the last boss, despite having picked the "story mode", so I would say it was the right difficulty for me. I definitely recommend this.

The game is very fun. Much like the first game, it's art style and immersive music just draws you in and you can't help but love it.

The combat is just as well polished and the parry, which in my opinion, is one of the best for a game in this genre, still makes you feel a certain way when clashing with the enemy.

The world feels smaller, but thanks to the addition of the sprint and grappling hook, it is so much easier to traverse from point A to point B. The locations and backgrounds are beautifully created. The addition of fast travel is an amazing fix to backtracking aspect of the game. I was pleasantly surprised to see them in the game!

However, that's about where the good points, unfortunately, end.

I have many gripes with this game, a lot of them ported over from the first one.

I will start with the problems both games share:

No skip function. I understand that this game wants to be heavy on the story. I get that. But when the characters "talk" often the narrator has long since finished the instructions making you have to wait for the slow speech bubbles to appear with their indicators. Even for a first save, there are certain points in the game where you save before a big fight, there is a dialogue, you die and then you have to re-listen to the entire scene again which gets really tedious if you play on the hardest difficulty. A simple fast forward could have easily solved this issue and I'm sad to see that it has not been fixed.

The side quests are an, still, underwhelming fetch quests. You talk to NPC A and they tell you to go to point B on the other side of the universe to pick up an item then, if no fast travel present, waddle back to them and you're done. It's extremely underwhelming and honestly feels unrewarding. They feel like an afterthought for the game once again. It lacks heart.

The fall damage is still consistently bad. Just like the first game, there are certain points of the game where you simply can not avoid fall damage forcing you to heal. These are also high traffic areas of the game so you will inevitably succumb to this issue as well. The annoyance adds up.

The constant backtracking is present as well taking away from the enjoyable moments of this game.

The hardest difficulty is unbalanced to a degree that makes no sense. Instead of it being an actual difficulty, it just feels artificial. You die in two hits regardless if you wear armor or not. Enemies are fast often giving you no time to react or are fast enough to chain animations together while you are stuck in your own most likely killing you in the process.

These are problems that I have faced in both games, unfortunately this game also managed to gather a multitude of it's own. Such as:

The grappling hook is a gimmick as much as it's a useful tool, not really a game feature. It's a brilliant idea for travel, but it is very underutilized. It could have been so much more. It could have, for instance, been used as a way to get down from high areas, removing the fall damage issue mention above.

The repeatable bosses are not fun to fight especially if you want to farm them. They constantly run across the map every time you lower a third of their HP giving you no choice but to follow them. This is fine when they are unique bosses or you encounter them for the first time, it;s immersive. But when you constantly run around the map for a single enemy that is nothing more than a way to gather resources, it's tedious and not enjoyable.

The story feels like "you can copy my homework" type of situation. I can't honestly ignore how similar it feels to Tails of Iron 1. There are aspects here that differ from the prequel, sure, but most of it feels like the same gift wrapped in different packaging. It's enjoyable, of course, and I had a lot of fun with it. But I was nowhere near as invested in Arlo's story compared to Redgi's.

The elements mechanic. This. by far, was the worst part for me. There was a genuine idea and a good one at that. But it gets lost really hard. Every enemy, no matter how small or insignificant, can become arduous if you have the wrong gear on. This in it's own self is a very good mechanic. But the problem is that multiple locations in the game feature different types of enemies that you simply can not prepare beforehand for, forcing you to switch weapons and armor in the middle of combat which interrupts the flow of the game. This paired with the enormous amount of items the game has make for an underwhelming experience.

Items & crafting. As I've mentioned above, there are a lot of items. Way too many to be able to keep track of. Four Different armor pieces (including the shield) with different elements and different stats, the gargantuan number of weapons with their own attributes makes you lose track of what you have and what you need. The game desperately needs a filter system and a way to more easily compare gear. The little green arrow you get is simply not enough for this game. By the last half of the game, I ended up completely ditching all the weapons favoring an ax you get later on and just put on the best looking armor set in my eyes and opted to simply not get hit. This is wrong. The player should not be made to choose the path of least inconvenience.


All of these issues combined really impacted my overall enjoyment of the game. If I were to rate it, it would be a generous 7/10. But that is pushing it. The game is a massive downgrade in my honest opinion. It is at a constant war with itself. What it is vs. what it should have been. What it needed to be vs. what the developers made it to be. The story is rushed towards the end and the final decisions make absolutely no sense whatsoever; it mostly seems like cheap set up for the next game. There is too much stuff and too little time. Too many mechanics but they are not given enough of a playground to be really meaningful.

I recommend you to play this game because it's a good game, But it could have been great. It's worth the price and you will get a unique experience playing it. I truly hope that the developers take all the issues we have with both of these games and build something great. I eagerly wait to see more from this studio. I believed that they can create something amazing.