Legend of Grimrock II is an action role-playing video game developed and published by Almost Human. It is the sequel to the 2012 title Legend of Grimrock, and was released for Microsoft Windows in October 2014,[1] and later for OS X in March 2015.[2]
Legend of Grimrock 2 Game
Like its predecessor, Legend of Grimrock II is a tile-based real-time dungeon crawler, inspired by titles such as Dungeon Master, but it adds a number of modern features, such as nonlinear gameplay, multi-height levels, persistent injuries, and underwater sequences. In the game, players control a party of one to four characters which they move through a 3D rendered grid-based world in first-person view.[1]
In the game, the party of prisoners gets stranded on the mysterious island of Nex after their transport ship is caught in a severe thunderstorm and gets wrecked on the island beach. The prisoners gradually explore the island and discover forests, rivers and swamps on the ground level, and ancient ruins and crypts below it. Their progress is monitored by the elusive Island Master who alternates between providing hints for the prisoners and taunting them of upcoming challenges.
Legend of Grimrock II was originally designed as downloadable content (DLC) for the first game. Almost Human soon realized that developing it as a DLC was constraining them because of the game engine limitations. They also had ambition and enough ideas for a full sequel. In the beginning of 2013, a decision was made to set the game on an island which drove the game design towards non-linearity. The budget was significantly higher than the first game, mainly because of the larger team size and twice as long development time. As of November 2014, the game has almost made its budget back.[4]
Legend of Grimrock II was well received by the gaming press, with an average rating of 85 by 37 critics on Metacritic. The reviews generally praised the game's challenge level and refreshing focus on a rare genre, while noting the improvement on its predecessor due to its expanded scope, better character development, and more freedom of progression.[5]
Grimrock II has little to do with the mountain peak in the game's title; rather, it serves as reassurance that the formula defined decades ago, and modernized in the original Grimrock, still elegantly drives the experience. You fashion a party of adventurers with classic Dungeons & Dragons character trappings and step through unexplored three-dimensional terrain one tile at a time. Along the way, you acquire armor, weapons, and artifacts of increasing prowess, outfitting each of your characters to do real-time battle against a bestiary of monstrous creatures. You trigger fatally hidden traps, avoid the obvious ones, and search for vital clues to unlock gates and doorways, while solving riddles and puzzles in a quest for answers to larger mysteries and the almighty pursuit of power itself.
The openness of the island setting is mirrored in the game's navigation. Shortly after your arrival on Nex, you're free to traverse nearly anywhere you can see, assuming you can unlock the barriers to entry and survive your own curiosity. To that point, there's a naural sense of progression in Grimrock II: it gently guides you through each new zone without spelling out an optimal order for visiting them. Should you somehow decipher the means to wander into territory too dangerous for your fledgling skills, that gentle hand becomes a clenched fist, ready to immediately bludgeon your party for its foolhardiness--but the option exists, and that non-linearity is refreshing.
Overcoming the many vague riddles in Legend of Grimrock II is occasionally grueling, but to Almost Human's great credit, the answers are nearly always rooted in logic or interpretation, rather than finding some minute trigger on a wall. Oh, there are many secrets on Nex that are only uncovered with a keen eye, say, scrutinizing a sea of stone for the smallest switch, but these instances are almost exclusively tied to superfluous loot rather than vital game progression.
These functional additions to the bestiary are fairly indicative of what you should expect from Legend of Grimrock II: A well-established foundation revisited and excellently enhanced in the years between releases. Nearly every aspect of this dense adventure has been touched in a positive way, with none of the clutter that often accompanies second-act offerings that try to cram too much in. And despite the lack of narrative, Grimrock II is an outstanding second trip to the nostalgia well. It synthesizes the key elements that made the first game great, improves upon them in intriguing and powerful ways, and uses that as a platform for designing and launching more of the same great content.
Legend of Grimrock was the triumphant resurrection of a long-dead genre. Twenty years ago, first-person roleplaying games with real-time combat were the height of sophistication. I remember: I was there, playing them and having an amazing time. The question is whether this sequel can bring fresh creativity to grid-based dungeon crawling.
Instead of a dungeon, your team of four prisoners is shipwrecked on a mysterious island. You can run the default party, or build your own from an expanded range of character options. These include the disease-immune Ratling, and the Farmer, who improbably gains experience from eating instead of battle. I was frustrated by the original's long skill trees, which forced me to specialise before I understood the game, but there are now more skills with fewer levels, so I felt safe experimenting without fear of spoiling my character builds. It's enough flexibility to satisfy those who enjoy optimising statistics, but it's not necessary for success.
When ready, you're released into one of the new outdoor areas. The beaches and bogs, forests and foggy graveyards all look spectacularly atmospheric in the improved engine. But it's an illusion. You're still moving around a grid on a one-tap, one-square basis. The oddly geometric riverbanks give the game away: it's just a dungeon without a roof.
To see it all, you'll need to get past the puzzles that often control access to new areas. The diabolical mix of logic, riddles and hidden objects that characterised the original remains intact. Sometimes the solution is a distant pressure plate or secret button, sometimes it's experimenting with diverse switches and levers. There's little handholding: just you, your brain and the uncaring pixels. Getting stuck made me feel anxious and alone. The payoff for cracking the answer was a fleeting moment of being the cleverest gamer in the world.
That extra map space has been used to up the ante. Now, some puzzles demand you piece together clues and objects scavenged from the far corners of the island. Opening one stubborn door required me to untangle a cryptic riddle hidden in a library at the bottom of a distant dungeon. It's sometimes overwhelming: faced with some fresh conundrum, I was never certain if the answer was under my nose or hours further into the game. The problem is exacerbated by limited facilities for note-taking, buried in the automap.
Speaking of sights, Grimrock 2 looks great. The underground environment does give a lot of déjà vu, with the walls and floors being a little too familiar. Certain enemy types also return, but there are enough new ones, even early on, to prevent the game from feeling exactly like the previous one. Other areas are perhaps too big, because the frame rate takes a noticeable dip at times. The music is likewise amazing, and one of the hardest parts of the game is loading up a save, because it means that the main menu music ends.
Players also acquire a shovel early on in the game to dig for goodies in the dirt. However I completely forgot this existed for most of the game outside of the first area, unless a sign reminded me in some way. Chances are, I missed out on a lot of hidden treasure chests!
For anyone who played the original, the aesthetic difference is impossible to miss. As you begin your adventure, locked in a cage on a beach, the presence of a blue sky above you and the distant horizons have an invigorating effect. This is a place that invites exploration. Yet Almost Human has wisely resisted the lure of the sandbox. You're still restricted to the same old school grid pattern as before, the world built around the same reliable graph paper boxes that drove stylistic predecessors such as Eye of the Beholder. Often the game conspires to force you down narrow corridors, formed by trees or rocks as well as actual stone walls, but it also opens out when needed, into spacious clearings. It's an environment at once expansive and focussed.
A similar canny balancing act plays out in Grimrock 2 at every level, resulting in a sequel that improves its template across the board without falling foul of the easy design trap of cramming in new features. In 2012, Almost Human intimately understood the style of game it wanted to resurrect and it hasn't allowed success to bloat that vision.
Control is simple and intuitive. Click on objects in the world to pick them up. Drop them into the open hand slots of the character windows, or place them in their inventories. Right clicking uses items and weapons. It's the same system you use to interact with files and programs on your PC, so virtually anything you want to do in the game is done how you'd expect. Rare is the situation where you need to turn to the instructions for help navigating the game's systems.
You will, however, need help navigating the island itself, which is both larger and more complex than the Grimrock dungeons of old. Partly this is an idea sold through the greater visual variety made possible by the outdoors locations, as you trek from beach to forest to swamps and beyond, but it's true at a structural level as well. The first game was great, though it was contained and largely linear. Now, Grimrock spreads in multiple directions at once, and reckless players who charge ahead, filling in as much of the automap as they can, will easily find themselves overwhelmed. 2ff7e9595c
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