This has got to be one of the worst, most aggravating games I have ever played... From Hell's heart I sta
Graphics are okay, but the textures suck. Really, they look awful. Environments are rather well done, and the darker artistic direction is interesting, but that's pretty much it. Nothing mind blowing here.
Sound is also pretty bad. Quality is mostly fine, but the music sucks ass! And that comes from me as a huge metal head, but the metal tracks here are both terrible and too repetitive and does not fit the game at wall. Why would I listen to Godsmack while I am jumping walls in ancient Persia?
Gameplay is infuriating, repetitive and cheap as hell. You are in a single island fortress the entire game, and while the actual environments there are varied enough, the developers decided on forcing the player to repeat every single god damn section 3-4 times, in the present, in the past, backwards and sometimes just exactly the same thing you have already jumped through earlier. It's a pitiful way on prolonging the game's playtime, because jumping through the exact same section 4 times is NOT entertaining.
On top of that, the game isn't quite linear either, and you will constantly be wondering which direction you are supposed to go next. And as if that wasn't bad enough, you can go the wrong way for 30 minutes, get lost, consult a walkthrough and then find out you have been going the wrong way the entire time and have to turn back. Banging your head against the desk is likely to ensue.
Combat is more varied than the first game, but still not good enough. The game brags about having more than 50 combos and weapons to use, and while the combos are fine, all weapons handle exactly the same.
The game fortunately does not spam endless waves against you like in the first game (well, sometimes it does), but the enemy variety is still poor and filled with cheap knock down attacks.
I stopped playing about 2/3 in, as I just cannot take it any more. Some sections are timed with your ledges and beams falling off under you, meaning you have to make split second decisions. Which thanks to the f*cking static camera means you cannot see where the hell you are supposed to be jumping, and as a result will die, and die, and die, and make a sandwich, and die, and die again. Combine that with awfully sparse checkpoints and you have a real recipe for failure.
And is that wasn't bad enough, you sometimes get attacked mid-jump by an enemy outside the screen that you have about 0.2 sec to see and attack before auto-death. Again, NOT fun!
And sometimes when you use the sands to go back in time and avoid getting killed, the game bugs up on you and you will get stuck in the wall, or fall through the floor to your death without you being able to do anything about it. At other points a crucial cutscene or script does not activate, and door that are supposed to open remain closed and you are forced to kill yourself and replay the checkpoint a couple of times until it decides to allow you to continue.
As for the story, it's just confusing. You are hunted by a monster (that you have to run away from during long sequences with no checkpoints) that tries to kill you and must find a way to make it stop by going back in time a ton of times back and forth to fix the sands of time from being created, bla bla bla. Weirdly enough you can still use the sands of time even though you don't have the dagger and is in the past before they were even created, but why would that part make sense when everything else is terrible?
To summarize: this game is AWFUL! Just awful. Why are so many people giving this game a free pass? Yes, the platforming can be somewhat amusing when it works, and the combat isn't a borefest like in the first game, but the rest is just inexcusable. For shame, Ubisoft, for shame.