Grimrock 2 is a well made RPG with roots in a past for which I have no nostalgia. The arcane mechanics it uses, combined with spotty systems that feel weird and unpolished - all of that mixed with the relative difficulty - prevented me from getting super invested in it. I had an okay time and a few of the things I did were fun, but overall I wasn't sad to move on.
The character creation resembled the one from the original grimrock game - meaning that you have very little idea of what you need to do - but that's part of the fun, making a party of four different classes, like alchemist, warrior and farmer. Picking up a range of stats and skills is always fun, but I'm always left wondering. Will that firearms skill be useful? How prevalent are guns? Should I take critical, heavy weapons, accuracy or athletics on my warrior? Also the whole range of magical elements, each tied to certain spells. It's a bit overwhelming.
Walking around works much like in LoG1, you have your four characters on one 'square' of the map and you move around one square at a time, you can also rotate towards your enemies. Depending on who's on front, you can more or less decide which characters take melee damage and attack with close range weapons, and your back row guys can be your ranged attackers and your spell casters. It's a neat system, but I wish your guys would just auto-attack. Every battle action is on a cooldown, so you just have to rotate between clicking on different icons when they light up. Spells are worse since you have to select the runes to create them every time. Right-clicking to auto-fight would've been cool.
I like the style of the auto-map, filling in as you explore grid-based environments like a beach or a forest. Solve puzzles and defeat plenty of enemies. I was surprised by that teleporting trap that brought me to a mummy infested dungeon when I grabbed a new gun, and that first 'boss' was okay, but there's some jank here and there, no doubt. A 'puzzle' of sorts where I had to walk on a floor with spikes coming out at specific interval was completely trivialized by just me moving through it, never taking damage for some reason. Walking around is a bit annoying anyways. Exploration is important, but you move kinda slow on that map, adding to that the various injuries to further slow you down, encumbrance and a food system, you're bogging me down, LoG2
Legend of Grimrock 2 is probably for someone, but that's not me. The loot and character progression aspects aren't engaging enough to balance everything else, if you like these kind of grid-based RPGs, it might be more of your cup of tea.
