The Talos Principle 2

Just skip all the story and do the puzzles

When you're just in the mood to solve some puzzles, the long, winding vistas and philosophical musings can wear thin, but otherwise, this is some top-level presentation to match some engaging FPS puzzle solving. If you loved the first, you'll like this one too.

It doesn't live up to the original, feels watered down and commoditized.

Same as other negative reviews. Dialogs are horrendous, the context is not as mysterious with uninteresting characters always giving uninspired remarks. Everything in the world seems streamlined in a unorganic way, feeling indeed like a game and not an immersed experience where we deal with interesting questions like the first. Puzzles until now are good, but I’m not there only for the puzzles, and story and philosophical questions that were there in the 1st are blotched and uninspired. Should have not bought it in advance, I would have gotten a refund

The game is gorgeous, there is a lot of dialogue/monologue, the maps are huge and the puzzles are the small puzzles spread out all over it. Compared to the original Talos Principle puzzles, the main game puzzles are really simple and straightforward. I blazed through most of these (including the extras) without having to pause and think once I figured out that these are really that simple. So for me 90% of the game was running from one puzzle to the next, solving in a sometimes less than a minute and then checking out all the mysteries marked in the HUD with an ?, rinse and repeat. There is a story which was nice and deep in a way, but the other robots were mostly just there as a filler (and for world building, I guess) and a bit annoying. In summary: the original was better, this was ok, if you don't mind the too easy puzzles and running around. Maybe the more puzzling puzzles are DLC?

I don’t think The Talos Principle 2 is worth its price. Even if you enjoy puzzle games, there are better options. Some puzzles are fine, but frustrating design choices often get in the way. Drowning feels arbitrary and annoying. The soundtrack is good but too limited, so it becomes repetitive. I also ran into technical issues, like a severe FPS drop on the West 2 golden challenge Hollow, and a Dystopia glitch that turned everything extremely dark until I reloaded the game. On top of that, the philosophical writing often feels pretentious and overdone rather than meaningful. There are good ideas here and the game is playable, but I cannot recommend it.

Puzzles are a little bit less complicated than in tp1 (not a single one took me more than 40 minutes to solve while in the first part I could be spending hours on some regular one), star puzzles are million times more trivial, in my opinion it really lacks the challenge. However, the plot, world, characters and new puzzle mechanics are awesome. I am pretty much sure most of us don't play this game just because we like solving puzzles ;) (though we most certainly do)

Uninstalled (after downloading 77GB of data). Played 2.7 hours, so no refund. This is the opposite of what I was looking from a Talos sequel. Even if you mute the voice audio and disable subtitles, you still see avatars pop-up as your "friends" constantly talk at you.