This feels about as good as this sort of richly-polished blockbuster game gets. The performances are charming and engaging, and the story is constantly finding new interesting character pairings. The cast thoughtfully runs the gamut of Norse mythology and offers new, sympathetic portrayals for many of the more familiar names. The environments are stunningly lavished with detail. The combat is even deeper and more tactical than before, with a nearly overwhelming variety of options for managing enemies.

And yet, I was also semi-regularly frustrated. The relentless, immediate spoilers from companions for the glut of mostly obvious environmental puzzles are bizarre, but even worse is the total lack of guidance if you’re struggling with the most challenging puzzles in the game, which all show up in the combat. There are way more enemy types this time around, and many of the combat scenarios throw them at you in configurations that (if you’re playing on a hard enough difficulty) require specific tactics in addition to quick thinking and button presses. But the game will let your health empty over and over without ever pointing towards anything particularly misguided about your tactics; I had to figure out what I was doing wrong to progress each time. It’s doubly annoying that so much of the combat difficulty comes from fighting the camera; there’s so many ranged, status-dealing, wildly agile enemies that show up in aggressive mobs with spongy health bars. I could have turned the difficulty down a bit (and eventually did once I was bored near the end of the post-game stuff), but I wanted to understand the combat design better, not just skew the numbers in my favor enough to ignore it.

This is also a game that has very few new ideas for gameplay mechanics. It rigidly rejects any attempt at interacting with the environment in a way that wasn’t already thought of by the devs and polished for 1000s of hours. I enjoyed exhausting the optional content outside the main storyline, but I probably don’t need to play another game for a long while that rewards my curiosity exclusively with chests of incremental crafting materials that are then used to tick up an array of numbers I can rarely feel the difference in. Similarly, I’m not sure how many more HD cliff faces I need to amble across with grip spots or slowly shuffle across on a narrow ledge.