This game is a lot more of the 2018 God of War, which is great by me. That one was one of my favorite games, perhaps hitting harder since I had just become a parent when I played it and couldn't really fathom how to raise a child without my wife around.

This one didn't have that type of impact, perhaps because the parenting issues were ones that I wouldn't have run into yet, but I still found the narrative to be engaging and well done. In particular, Odin was top notch in this game.

I have seen some complaints about the pacing - swapping between the linear story segments and the more open side-quest segments, but I actually really liked that aspect of the game. I tend to play games by doing as many side quests as possible before advancing the main story, and the way this game was structured provided a nice counter-balance to the way I would normally do things. Additionally, some light metroid-vania elements of having areas of the world be inaccessible until some item was unlocked further in the story made it so that I did keep steady story progress. I very much appreciated the characters providing some throw away dialog lines to let you know that the thing you are puzzling over would require an item you didn't have yet, so that you didn't sit around trying to figure out something that wasn't yet doable.

This game does have a lot of systems and fairly technical combat. I found them all enjoyable by the end, but it did take me a couple of hours to get my head around it. I can certainly imagine that this would not be the type of game you could put down and come back to later - keeping all the different move sets in your head (in addition to the story line) would be a bit too much.

Overall, my favorite game of 2022.

I liked the twists to the turn based combat from the last game - and in general it was a fairly fun game.

Navigating the overworld wasn't as fun, and it got to be a bit too finicky (especially when trying to figure out how to get to some of the quests in the late world).

I also wish the time to level up the characters was a bit shorter, and that the level cap of 30 was higher. Especially since many of the abilities take multiple level ups to unlock, it felt like it took a long time to unlock new abilities for the characters. I also hit the level cap before the end of the game, so no new mechanics were available to me as I finished it up.

Overall, I found the game itself enjoyable if somewhat repetitive.

Very enjoyable - a fun mix of stealth, action, and rouge-lite elements, all with typical Arcane world building. The banter between Colt and Julianna was quite good. A real highlight was the job the game does of building tension, especially in the early game - should I press my luck and try to take out that visionary, or should I go back to the tunnel and lock in these trinkets and weapons that I have already found.

This tension did taper off toward the mid-to-late game however, since I wound up finding a loadout that worked well for me- Shift and Nexus slabs (perhaps since I just recently played the Dishonored games, I was used to those powers) along with a silenced pistol, a sniper rifle, and a shotgun, and not modifying it much. I do wish there were better ways to improve your character between loops toward the end game - I wound up not using most of the trinkets I would find in an area (there would be lots of duplicates or versions of lower power than I already had).

Minor gripe is that there seems to be achievement related bugs, I never unlocked several of the story related achievements even though I did complete the game.