This is the buggiest game that I ever loved playing.

User Rating: 8.1 | Gothic II PC
This is the buggiest game that I ever loved playing. It's hard not comparing this to The Elder Scrolls. While it is not at large or as deep as that game, it hits a lot of the same marks for me. I loved exploring this world. The backstory was interesting, and there is a huge playground of fun stuff to discover. You get to really live IN this world. Even though it ISN'T as large as The Elder Scrolls, it's feels just right because you get the same sense of discovery and adventure, without the HOURS of time spent traversing the exhaustively large worls in that other game.

The biggest problem with this game is the interface and it's bugginess. In an afternoon play session, the game would crash on me at least a dozen times. After the first crash, it will crash again within minutes if you don't reboot first. The file system it runs under is really unstable. I've seen blue screens, instant reboots, and frozen systems more times playing this game than in the entire live of my laptop.

Furthermore, the interface sucks. Some menus were traversed with the arrow keys, and some ONLY work with the mouse scroll wheel. If I didn't have the scroll wheel, I'm not really sure what would have happened. There is NO mouse cursor in this game. You have to scroll around with menus. Come on, this game isn't THAT old. Lame. I should also mention that I restarted the game from the beginning at least a dozen times and had to sit through the stupid opening nonsense more times that I'd like to admit because the "New Game" option sits prominently at the top of the menu throughout the entire game. Additionally, the shading change for selected menu items is so subtle, sometimes you aren't sure what you're selecting even when you ARE being careful. Again, lame.

JoWood has not had a good run with me. They make buggy stuff. They really need to take more care to put out better quality games. But this is the first that I haven't deleted in frustration. I really loved it. The story and characters were great. The voice acting was atrocious. Otherwise, I liked the music. It wasn't GREAT great, but it set the mood brilliantly. I particularly liked the ominous music as you first head into the valley of mines.

All in all, I loved this game, and I have every intention of playing it again as some other character class at a later date. But working myself up to dealing with the crashes and bad interface is going to take some time.

Looking forward to the sequel.