Im writing this review with best intentions of making the G2 NOTR best possible remake.
To get ready for the review I made 3 playthroughs with different builds: the 1h/2h warrior, the bowman and the mage. All playthroughs were done on the hardest difficulty.
To make the game faster I used the following mods:
- G1R_FastDeathReload - I was dying a lot, wanted to make the recovery faster
- G1R_FullGameSpeed - to move faster between areas during backtracking
- G1R_PutAwayTorchRedux - self-explanatory
- HighlightItemsLite - self-explanatory
- Movies - kill intro movies
- QuickAnimations - original animations are too slow
- SkillfulLocks - will describe
- SimplemodLoader - base for mods above
Ive been playing G1/G2/G2 NOTR for more than 20 years and did tens of playthroughs. I guess its enough to know why the original game rocks and how to help in creating a better experience with G2 Remake.
Ill start with simple but messy pros and cons and them I will try to tell more of a story about the story and builds.
Its more of a review for experienced players as I will bring back memorable things for diehards.
General Pros:
- bringing back the abandoned mine and bringing back the original free mine entrance without nexus loading - wow
- chromanin - the golem under the old citadel was nice to see
- selling weed to Cipher finally worth it
- the mountain fortress Focus stone quest got a good remake
- Xardas' golems story
- reasonable fall damage (do you remember Witcher 3?)
- different stagger/falter moments for different orc units
- the same weapons from the original in the original places
- water reacting with a barrier in swamp camp
- swords and axes are different style weapons
- custom actions - column/bell fall
- orcs in whole orcland stop attacking you after bringing Ulu-mulu
- saving system
- very good mobs design, especially scavengers with the bones etc
- the dialogs sometimes get customised like when you're ahead in looking for Focus Stone with Gorn
General Cons:
- low responsiveness of all the animations and actions
- no info on recipes when you're in inventory
- melee far to slow comparing to speed of tundra wolves or Frost shadowbeast
- holding torch and 1h sword simultaneously not possible
- slow swimming
- no speed potions/rings/spells
- Beasts of Khorinis books - good idea, but finding some of them (Xardas and Shrat) is too difficult
- slow teleporting, it has been sped up in G2 comparing to G1 not without a reason
- mercenary armor is too weak, so after switching from OC to NC changing armor seems pointless
- after all these years its not possible to fight Gor Hanis (technically it is, but very difficult to trigger and there is no real reward like a conversation)
- food system - not enough to really use cooked food (probably changes a bit with one of the updates)
- weapons not stacking in inventory
- no riding scavengers in camps, seriously why? to make the lore make more sense?
- Milten use to be wise, now he's a ♥♥♥♥♥
- no fast way to get to orc city after getting out, there should be a tp scroll like in og
- only one alchemy table at watermages' thats always occupied by Riordian
- Torrez doesnt teach mana, so you have to learn magic from him and go ALL THE WAY TO NEW CAMP and learn mana from Cronos
- Cronos doesnt have mana potions
- no way to cancel the animation other than attack, f.e. walking to a cooking pot
- climbing is too slow
- Raven dies - you dont know why its Night of the Raven? There was areal chance to make a lore about it…
- why do I have to wait a load time during cooking or alchemy? WHAT ARE YOU LOADING?
- crawler is infighting Gor Boba and I cannot talk to him
- no base item value in inventory
- eq style copied from Risen rather then showing the real looks of items
- trading system sucks - I will elaborate
- in og Uriziel and rune armor were wielded by a general and it gets changed to pointless Innos Avatar and Gomez respectively, while we get no real and needed lore for Nek's death or Gilbert mission - you're wasting time for changing ok things instead of rebuilding things that already suck
- additional gate in orc city - no lore, nothing behind it, better just to erase it
- friendly fire on - after one shot my friend becomes hostile, event in og it was two hits, yet in AI era we get a downgrade xD
- firing spells and walking backwards is not magic - its creating FPS thats boring, it should not be possible and NPCs and mobs should be allowed to sprint and punish this behaviour, while spells should get more damage to overcome it
- no attribute+bonus system like in Chronicles of Myrtana - seriously was it that difficult to implement to get around the teaching barrier?
- world - caves, weird places are not very rewarding and you just better beat Silas the get better weapon
- no diary of slave in sleepers temple - that deletes the lore of people being forced to work there
- not possible to jump while using magic or bow/xbow
- very limited ammo for bow
- tasks triggered by skill - Huno
- not all documents are translated
- initial loading screens show past events, not the already ongoing or nearest future/todo things
Massive plotholes
- paying 100 ore for getting back to OC while Gomez would pay thousands to get you killed seems unreasonable and simply stupid
- Cord and guys doing nothing in free mine - dudes its 20 years later, they should interact
- no OC guards in free mine except for entrance - kinda nonsense
- Kalom leaves SC and no-one gives a ♥♥♥♥
- rice prince Hakon - seriously? There is a character with exact name in G2
- according to lore Caine is spying for both NC and OC - lazy writing
- Ian and Asghan not interested in Crawler Queen death - they should be the most happy people on the planet
- connecting Focus Stones to Sleeper is arguable, as they were used by civilization of Jharkendar - again, why are you changing things that work instead of things that suck?
- nothing to talk about with xards after talking with Urshak - he gave us the mission and now doesn't wanna talk?
The plot in general goes to fast. Xardas is like "we already met 20 years ago so Im not telling you anything, just go, kill, beat the Sleeper". It's killing the immersion. And why does he sound like angry psycho instead of Uber Dark Lord as in og?
The game in general is very slow - fighting is slow, animations are slow, swimming is slow, climbing is slow. I wanted to do 3 playthroughs and without mods speeding the game up 5x I would be able to. The og was arcade'y, now its slow. Noone cares about animations in the 3rd decade of 21st century! And they are nothiung special! Just let us play the game and stop artificially making the play time longer.
The amount of backtracking is horrific. And its slow. I was amazed by getting a new task before looking for a Focus Stone for Y'berion. Then I learned I have to travel across all the colony. The same meeting friends after talking to Saturas. And backtracking while meeting friends outside of Old Mine. Backtracking, backtracking, backtracking all the way. Its almost like you wanted to make an average playtrough longer that way.
The limited ammo for bow is a thing without a name. I wanted to clear the whole colony in Chapter 1 with a bow. Yet, I was struggling with arrows and constantly trying to buy them wherever I appeared. In the end I was worrying if 1k arrows would suffice for the Crawlers Temple. Why did you do this???
Fighting
1h/2h
Im not a huge fan of this system, I like the og batter as it was arcady and fast and responsive. I would strongly recommend going back and modernizing like in Risen 1. The thing thats nuts is parrying - keep that. But make the fighting faster so I can block and parry several Times during 3 seconds like it was in og. Right now its slooooow.
