Quite disappointing. Going in totally blind and as a big fan of the original, I was initially excited by the greatly expanded scope of the story, the NPCs, and the world. But that faded quickly as the story bored, the puzzles proved weirdly easy, and the massive areas revealed themselves to be hollow, immensely frustrating to navigate, and totally pointless to explore.

That last one made me the most crestfallen. The first game had relatively small, dense levels that were absolutely packed with Easter eggs and ingenious secrets, constantly challenging you to leave the beaten path and rewarding every stray thought of, "I wonder if ..." with the confirmation that, yep, the devs did think of that, and they put something there just for you. Sometimes a silly something; sometimes an important something! I love games like that. I feel like that used to be Croteam's thing. But TTPII almost feels like a deliberate and direct refutation of that design ethos, with every area very rigidly and lamely having the same types and amounts of collectibles and "secrets" (now obvious riddles that a ten-year-old could decipher) signposted and marked on your compass. It's possible that there are a ton of awesome other secrets and eggs out there somewhere, but with how stupidly large and overstuffed with meaningless decoration the areas are, digging around for any amount of time only to be consistently rewarded with jack shit doesn't exactly make you want to continue looking. Compounding this problem (and creating lots of others) is the navigation. You'll notice I said "marked on your compass" earlier, not "marked on your map" ... yeah. I'll happily admit that I am worse at directions/navigation/orienteering than lots of people, but running around these giant, empty-ass yet topographically complex areas is fucking maddening, and the fact that they didn't give you any kind of overhead map option (and even only added the compass when people bitched!!) is absolutely unthinkable. I understand that the idea of exploring the areas is important to the story and the thematic content therein, but you're playing as a group of fucking robot intellectuals. They would MAKE MAPS. I don't like calling devs lazy, but it's either that or stupid in this case, so, take your pick, I guess.

That stuff is just the most glaring problem, but as I said, there are other significant ones. The story is exceptionally long and long-winded. All of the optional puzzles in every area are weirdly gated behind doing EVERY "secret" thingy in the ENTIRE GAME first, which makes them all amount to a kind of almost-post-game sidequest that you unlock that you have to do all of right in a row before the finale, which is dumb. The massive alien structures dominating each area that you need to get into are totally meaningless from a gameplay perspective, essentially being large 3D sculptures that house a single room with a cutscene and a switch, so what's the fucking point of them. The same goes for the showstopping central pyramid that you keep returning to - just (long) hallways connecting (very easy) puzzles and nothing to explore and no mystique whatsoever. There is no difficulty curve to speak of and almost every puzzle in the game is easier than the stuff in the back half of its predecessor. And, oh yeah, the entire build is a mess with game-breaking glitches and softlocks absolutely everywhere.

So, yeah. It's a shame. Bigger isn't always better in games. Again. Still love the spirit of the original, which this one definitely lost.