This game is genuinaly rubbish, and you should only buy it if the following factors apply;
1. You enjoy adventure caper storylines set in the past (1950s Cold War in this case)
2. You are prepared to put up with many areas of subpar graphics and cutscenes that look far worse than the first game
3. You are prepared to put up with frequent bugs and crashing. Just starting the game would take me half a dozen times on occasion before it would work
4. You enjoy overly convoluted puzzles or are happy using a walkthrough to cheese through most of it
5. The game is on deep sale (90% off or more)
If none of those apply, it’s not worth it.
To go into more detail, this feels like an attempt to correct areas of criticism that the first game had, but the money ran out half way through. This is combined with a number of other bizarre choices that leave the game just feeling like a mess.
Firstly, as I understand it, the game runs on an old version of Unity. It crashed all the time for me. I tried fixes, but through my attempts to diagnose issues via the logs and the help of Chatgpt, it seems it’s just inherent to the game. I tried a few fixes such as disabling overlays, but they didn’t help much. As the game progressed the crashes got better, but I essentially had to save scum to ensure I didn’t lose progression, and the fact that quick save is removed, unlike the first game, is very annoying.
Secondly, the game manages the remarkable achievement of both looking really pretty at points, and absolutely terrible at others. The landscapes/backgrounds look beautiful, and are all gorgeous and interesting to look at. I was always keen to see where the next location would be and there’s a great variety. On the other hand, character models are awful, and the cutscenes look like they are from the year 2000. The character models look far worse than the previous game, which used a slightly cartoony style to cover imperfections. Here characters are badly animated and modelled, to the point where in many dialogue scenes characters don’t even move their lips. When they do it’s just badly animated flapping. The worst character is Gwen, the main characters daughter, who looks nothing like her depiction on the cover art, and instead looks like a mannequin. Noticeably as the game progresses, the perspective from each area gets further and further away, as if the developers realised how bad the characters look. I note that none of the screenshots show close ups of characters either, focusing on the nice landscapes instead.
On the gameplay front, puzzles seem to have been increased in difficulty from the first game, but they seem to have become needlessly convoluted and difficult. Perhaps I would have had a bit more fun if I had engaged in the puzzles without a walk-through, but after chapter 2, between crap puzzles and all the crashing I lost patience and began cheesing it. The game does provide a walk-through that is literally accessible in game, so perhaps the developers realised they’d made it too hard. To give an idea how annoying some puzzles are, in chapter 2 you need to find a hidden entrance to a bunker. In the game you find a partial map, and you need to find another map to combine with it, which gives you directions. Using this, I could clearly navigate to the spot required, but the game wouldn’t let me interact or progress until I had done another puzzle, where I created balloons from bits of rubbish found in the game to mark areas in the landscape to “orientate” the main character. This allowed me then to go back to the same location that I had already found earlier and finally progress.
The game also tries to be a bit more action focused to match the adventure story line, with quick time events and short sort of stealth sections, and 3d adventure sections. These are all awful, with clunky, unresponsive controls and unclear directions.
On the story front, it has jumped forward 20 years. The main voice actor from the first game has been replaced, which makes sense I guess as he’s many years older and gone through the war, and now appears to be an agent for British intelligence, though much of this is implied rather than stated. Other than Paddock, none of the characters from the first game appear, this includes Kim who appears to have abandoned her and Paddock’s daughter.
The choice to skip forward 20 years is bizarre, it’s the sort of thing you do if making a legacy sequel to a film and all the cast are aged and some aren’t available. It seems odd to do it here in a video game released only 5 years after the first, and abandoned the characters and pre war setting that worked well for the first game. Paddock is not as cheery or quippy as the first game, and is less fun overall, which again makes sense, he’s been hardened, but it’s never really addressed. He’s also a terrible father, packing his daughter off to boarding school and apparently literally having never been with her for any of her birthdays. Bizarrely Gwen, his daughter, doesn’t seem to have many negative feelings over this.
The story line is off pacing wise and feels like chunks were removed. For example at one point we are told we need to search for some information at Sandhurst Military Academy, which feels like it will lead to a gameplay section there, but the next cutscene we are off to Jersey instead, and it’s just said that Paddock’s “contacts” told him he needed to go there. The main villains are very poorly explained. They wanted vengeance after witnessing the death of their father as children by the Nazis, but it doesn’t explain why they hate Paddock so much, other than them being evil. The super powered ancient viking/asgard artifacts don’t really seem to make much sense in their quest to hunt Nazi war criminals either. The ending of the story is god awful, descending into mystic magic Viking ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ but never really introducing it. The first game at least introduced and explained it’s mystic ideas over the course of the game which made it feel more natural. The game also ends abruptly after the core conflict is resolved, with no wrap up or coda. There also seem to be less chapters in the game, with the length artificially extended by hard puzzles. There are only 6 chapters and a couple are really short.
I did enjoy the various beautiful locations, and laughing along at some of the choices or leaps of logic the game makes (why an earth would the Soviets hide the entrance to their secret base under the coffins of Stalin and Lenin for example?). I liked the ambience or vibe of the game as well, there’s not many games I can think of that have you running around as a secret agent in Egypt during the Suez crisis.
I’m glad I used a walkthrough to blast through this in less than 6 hours and I still can’t shake the feeling that I’ve wasted my time here. It’s overall unsatisfying, and the only useful things I’ve taken away is looking at how it’s failed and general pleasure in ragging on the game, though considering how low profile it is, that does feel somewhat like screaming into a void.
EDIT - It appears that many of the crashes may be related to instability with my CPU - an 14900K, rather than the games fault. Thanks to intel and their shoddy workmanship, it can cause crashes and instability to many games. I initially thought this was just some newer games, such as UE5, but it appears that Unity really doesn't play nice, as I had similar crash and instability issues with the game Shadow Tactics, also on the Unity engine. Using Intel XTU to lower the core ratio by a couple of points completely ended the crashes in Shadow Tactics, and would likely do the same here.
The rest of the review stands. It still has bugs, terrible puzzles, bad graphics, and a pretty rubbish plot, but it will probably be stable to play.
