The Sinking City 2

SLAVA UKRAINI <3

In most ways the best game Frogwares have made so far and it's not even close. The biggest caveat is, that it's very different from their previous work, the detective gameplay is pretty slight in this one and they focused on RE-style survival horror instead. But what they do here is done so well, it didn't bother me at all. The early hours are good, but the game becomes truly fantastic by the point you reach the hospital section. Huge, sprawling levels that loop you through the area on multiple paths, tight and unforgiving resource balancing, great atmosphere, sharp writing and good voice performances to bring it alive. I mean, I expected to like this, but I didn't expect to like it this much!

I absolutely love the fact that instead of hollow repetitive open world of the SC1 we got a tight survival horror where the city is just a single location. I enjoy this game a lot.

Игра крепкий норм, близко к хорошо! Получил удовольствие от прохождения, геймплей приятный. Так как я не фанат прошлых детективных игр Frogwares, задумку сделать свой Резик одобряю. Немного поддушила локация с рыбным рынком. Всё-таки затопленный город в начале игры задал слишком высокую планку по атмосфере и вайбику. В целом игра как игра хорошая. А вот сюжетно, простите, полная шляпа. Сюжет этой игры уже давно написали в Super Mario. Мы буквально из главы в главу получаем одно и то же. «Ваша принцесса в другом замке». Концовка тоже, мягко говоря, такая себе. Но сама игра тупа топ, так что за это можно простить даже абсолютно всратый сюжет. 7/10

Having enjoyed Sinking City 1 a lot when I tried it on Steam a few years ago after devs Frogwares got control of their game finally, I was looking forward to 2 even with the clear departure it was taking from the start, doing something I had kind of hoped from SC1 in taking more inspiration from Resident Evil 2 remake than the clunky combat & resource management of their previous game. It is slightly sad that SC2 has only the vestigial remnants of its previous investigation systems, but they made a really good RE-like survival horror game, with excellent metroidvania levels, with that classic resource scarcity, great atmosphere, combat that punches above its weight even if it's not as juicy as the RE series has, it's still really great-- --If I were to have negatives, number one is how annoying it is to tinker with Unreal Engine every time to get it to run okay and not look broken. Probably quite a few of my 22 hours were spent on just tinkering with engine ini lines, going back-and-forth launching the game, clearing the shader cache, seeing if I reached something that looks at least slightly on par with RE2R (albeit blurrier) and not running at 15 frames a second. In the end, I had to swallow my pride, play with DLSS+framegen at an awful 60 (=30 in reality) fps, on high settings with a few more performance-memory tweaks, and got it to run consistently. At least Nvidia Reflex helped quite a bit with the latency, just be aware that it's broken on "auto", only at 2x framegen does Reflex work. I don't even need framegen to play Cyberpunk at a locked real 60fps which looks great. Man, why can't we get settings where games can look as good as say RE engine games from 7-1 years ago as well as run as well as they do? That's UE5 for ya. My other criticisms are minor punditry nitpicks. The dialogue is a bit out of place, your main character is established as having already some knowledge of the occult and having a history doing dark rituals with another main character (none of these are spoilers, you hear/read these in the first 5-10 minutes of the game), but come gameplay, and he talks out loud like an innocent stock character who is surprised by the things he sees-- He's been 3months surviving the flood, I expected a bit more of a jaded dry burned out delivery, like a Max Payne who's not surprised by anything at this point. Ending also had them say out loud certain things I kind of wished they would have conveyed more visually to us, but overall I didn't mind the ending, pretty classic Lovecraftian stuff. But that's not a big deal, it's not constantly in your face, for the most part you just silently explore the excellently crafted environments where you hunt for clues and keyitems, dodge and fight enemies and scavenge for resources. The devs made really nice locations to explore, from a Hotel, to a Hospital, to a Fishmarket, each with great looping gatekept design, nice progression of upgrades and weapons and enemy introductions, though the very last area seemed to tease a new enemy which I was very mildly disappointed weren't introduced and we fought the same roster of enemies instead. The rifle upgrades also felt like they came surprisingly late where you're not going to get too much use of them anymore, hunting for those rifle "feats" is going to be painful for the extra points to spend for the new game stuff where just like in RE games you can unlock new skills, weapons early and infinite ammo for them for future playthroughs. The last location overall felt maybe a tiny bit rushed now that I think about it, It's still cool, but the hint of a new enemy we never see, and also the location makes no use of evidence gathering and linking felt a bit weird, it had the bones of being another last area before the final boss, but they made it a lot more limited. A small detail that's neat, there's a lot of optional dialogue that you trigger mainly if you look at certain things and linger for a bit, you can miss a lot if you just run through areas and don't stop and look, that dialogue also didn't suffer from my previous gripes above. SC2 doesn't win prices for novelty or breaking the mold, it's very much inspired by RE2R, SH2R, DSR and all of their successes, but it could have been easy to make an annoying game that takes the wrong lessons from those as well, instead SC2 is I'm going to cheekily say a tiny bit superior to RE games in that at least there aren't those gimmicky sections where you're suddenly playing a different game, elaborate QTEs or forced stealth sections which Capcom keep littering into their RE games. BTW, if you get the Premium Edition you get an extra "mission", a Manor with its own self-contained story, you unlock a new weapon in it that you can then use in the main game, I'll say the Manor is again a really well designed location, a fun small Lovecraftian story, it's just again a solid 2-4 hours of great survival horror gameplay. It feels a bit weird to have day 1 a separate mission you kind of have to pay extra for, for any AAA company I'd frown on that, but here when the base game is cheaper than average and the premium only bumps up the price to standard levels, and the game is by a smaller self-published AA studio who have had some enormous struggles and relied on Kickstarter backers to help get this done (credits had like maybe 30-80 devs listed and then backers were 90% of the rest of credits), the extra mission seems more like it was something they did for backers and less to be scummy AAA devs who carve out content to make an easy buck. Anyway, outside of UE5 being UE5, the game's overall excellent, there's not much I can say that isn't a copy of praising say the RPD or Spencer Manor and equivalent well-crafted locations to do your surviving in, the combat's great though not as good as AAA studios can pull of, there's good replay value like in most RE games or Dead Space, Silent Hill etc, but it is fun to have a classic Lovecraftian setting for once in this well established genre, pretty well realized one as well.

If you're a fan of the survival horror this game is perfect for you. call it a RE clone if you want but it does it insanely well it has great optimization, great atmosphere and a great story hats off to the devs for creating a awesome product during a war. 10/10

Best lovecraftian game I've ever played. Highly recommend.