Dungeon Siege II

Были времена

Works horrible on modern PC. Expansion not availble for some reason - so no possibility for multiplayer.

Coming here right after finishing Dungeon Siege 1, I saw right away why some people hated this one (and 3, which I'll try soon) and thus believed that the first game was the only good one. But I disagreed, for the hour or so I spent getting to the start of the forest area and really starting the game after a lengthy tutorial section, I was enthusiastic about the rest of the game. Sure, the combat is worse. Yes, there are as many poor design choices as there are good ones. But what I experienced by that point gave me hope. Then I kept going, and in the span of about 90 minutes more I grew to hate what Gas Powered Games made and unleashed upon the world. It plays like a really rough, early prototype of Dragon Age Origins (a game which I think is fantastic, to be clear), when it was still in the tech demo stage before any polishing had been done. It's also much, much harder than the first game. Enemies hit harder, combat animations are way faster (framerate issue, perhaps) and they removed nearly all of the automation that made the first game's horde of enemies approach manageable. You've either got to have superhuman reflexes or pause to issue orders every second or two, and even then you can still get screwed when the miniboss takes half your health before you can blink. In addition to this, there are a number of incredibly stupid design choices that make the game feel much worse than the first one and it runs worse too. I barely scratched the surface of this game, and I know that giving up this early and leaving a negative review isn't really fair, but I think the only way I could ever recommend this is if you played it as a kid and are excited to get it again and lose yourself in the world, or if you got the entire franchise bundle for a great sale price as I did and thought "yeah, I might as well try it."