The second adventure of the “great” wizard Rincewind is better than its predecessor in almost every way.
Exactly! In the game adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels!
Just like in the first Discworld game you take control of Rincewind, an astonishing wizard capable of…well…every mistake that leads to total disaster.
The game plays in a city called Ankh-Morpork, and this time the story is directly based on one of the novels: Death (yes, the skinny guy with the habit to kill everything with a single touch) is sick of his job and throws in the towel…I mean the scythe. That leads to chaos everywhere, because the dead aren’t taken to the other side any longer and become zombies!
Now it’s your job to find death and to change his mind, or even to take care of his job.
The controls are like in any other adventure, where you point-and-click yourself through the entire game. But the movement of Rincewind feels much better this time.
Like you expect it from a Discworld adaptation, you find a lot of crazy items that you have sometimes to combine wither other, even crazier items.
The puzzles and riddles to solve are just as strange as they ever were, but here the difficulty is better balanced than before (so that you actually can have at least an idea of what to do next…).
How the inventory works is especially interesting. I already stated the following quote in my review of Discworld I, but it just gives so perfectly away what IT is. By IT I mean a certain thing called The Luggage, in which you can store all (yes, ALL) your items. So, here’s the quote from Wikipedia:
“The Luggage: A wooden chest with lots of little legs, big teeth and no respect for normal dimensions. It can also do your laundry.”
The graphics look far better that in the first Discworld game. They are just beautifully drawn and the style of it gives a good example of how it could really look like in Ankh-Morpork. The animations also look way better than before and aren’t lagging anymore (well, most of the time).
While the music is in no way bad, it’s just nothing that will stick in your mind for long.
The sound, meaning the voice acting, is very well done (again Eric Idle of the Monty Pythons voices Rincewind), but here comes one of the drawbacks: The problem with Discworld I was that a lot of the dialogue just seemed to never end and got boring soon. It’s become a little better in Discworld II, yet there are still some dialogues that will eventually make you yawn.
The game is still hard to beat, and again that’s mostly because of the crazy kind of riddles you have to solve to advance in the game. Once you beat it, though, there’s just no reason to play through it again.
If you are a fan of the Discworld novels and/or if you enjoyed the first game even the least bit, than you should definitely play this game sometime.
However, what I really recommend is just reading Pratchett’s novels. It’s an awesome humour that is ingeniously brought to paper.