The second game became bigger than the first one. Much bigger. But did it become better? Unfortunately no. It really took me a lot of time to decide how to rate this game. But than I came to realization: if it takes so long to weight all the pros and cons... the game indeed has issues. To understand why the second game feels kinda disappointing, it would be useful to remind why the first game was good.
First of all, as for me, it was properly balanced. The first game didn't have any cutting edge gamplay, midblowing story or stunning graphics. But exactly proper combination of everything made it so good for me. It had good puzzles, dark humour, intriguing story, unobtrusive combat, interesting atmosphere, small and memorable locations. While the game couldn't be considered as classical point and click game - it felt like one. Exactly because the game was compact and properly balanced.
And what do we have here? First of all, hu-u-u-uge locations. And a lot of time we spend in some, how should I put this... digital limbo I guess? Huge, empty, copy-paste and absolutely unremarkable locations, with lots of fake points of interest without any meaningful interactions. And confusing as well, brecause there is no map and it will be hard to navigate, so you will have to do a lot of backtracking.
The next issue - combat. Combat in the first game was not a big deal either, but again, it was rare, unobtrusive and even kinda fun. It felt more like a small puzzle to solve. Here? - tons of combat. It didn't become deeper, but it became much more frequent, intrusive and punishing. A-and even this minimalistic combat got even more limitations: we lost covers, our charges are now limited and we can't even jump if energy bar is depleted.
At the same time, we got more agile enemies with not very readible attack patterns. The choice of enemies also raises questions. If in the first game we were killing bots, here we are shooting... clouds. Yeah, clouds. Blue, red, yellow and black clouds. Dunno, who thought that it will be fun?
Puzzles do not bring as much fun anymore. Partially because now you have huge locations with tons of fake points of interest, partially because solutions are not that evident and even partially because sometimes you know the solution, but you still have to run some 'trials and errors' process, because you are not sure at which exactly piece of hardware you have to activate the item you found before.
I liked the first part of the story in the second game. It was really intriguing and more or less on the same note with the first game. The midgame plot twist, revealing the identity of the User was really unticlimatic, to say the least. I dropped the game at that moment. Came back later after a long break. Later on the story kinda gets better but it shifts direction in the narrative. Ok, I guess? The feature with different perspectives of 3 characters, utilized via gameplay was a cool idea.
What conclusion can I make? Not that bad, of course. More like disappointing, compared to the first game. Wish I could give a mixed mark. I still feel like I kinda need to 100% it at some point. And when I come back, again, I can still see those cool moment in the game that I liked. But at certain point realize that I waste like 2/3 time on stuff I hate - backtracking, clunky combat and checking fake points of interest. So maybe not this time... Nevertheless, still waiting for the 3rd game. I hope it won't be 'quantity over quality' like in the 2nd game, but more like evolvement of the ideas from the first one.
