Legend of Grimrock II Review
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Introduction
Legend of Grimrock II is the follow-up to 2012's Legend of Grimrock, which provided a small but entertaining dungeon-crawling experience. Grimrock II is definitely a "more" sequel. It's over twice as long as the original game, and it has more classes, races, levels, puzzles, and secrets. It even has more colors, since the game escapes from the drab confines of dungeons and sends you to beaches, bogs, deserts, and -- you guessed it -- more. Oftentimes "more" isn't the same as "better," but this time it is.
Grimrock II doesn't have a lot to do with the original Legend of Grimrock. There isn't any way to import your party from the first game, and the events that unfold are only tangentially related to what happened before. At one point during the game, you see a reference to Mount Grimrock (where the first game took place), but that's it. Instead, Grimrock II revolves around the Isle of Nex. Your ship wrecks there, and you spend the rest of the game trying to make your escape -- all while an "Island Master" alternatively taunts you and encourages you on.
Character Development
The first thing you do in Grimrock II is create your party of up to four characters. Each character has a race and a class. The races are about the same as before, except that along with humans, insectoids, lizardmen, and minotaurs, you can also choose ratlings. But the classes got expanded quite a bit. The original Grimrock only had classes for fighters, rogues, and wizards, but now you can also add in alchemists, barbarians, battlemages, knights -- and of course farmers. Farmers are a curious case; instead of gaining experience from killing creatures, they only improve themselves by eating food.
Races and classes give characters special bonuses. For example, humans gain experience +10% faster than the other races, while ratlings can gain a random attribute point each time they level up. Meanwhile, knights are only encumbered by half the weight of their armor, while alchemists can "grow" any herbs they have in their inventory.
Characters also have attributes and skills. The attributes -- strength, dexterity, vitality, and wisdom -- didn't change at all, and they do about what you'd expect. But the skills were completely revamped. Instead of giving each class a unique set of six skills, there are now only 16 skills total, and each class can put points into any of them. Moreover, instead of the skills being maxed out at 50 points, they now max out at five points, but characters only receive one skill point per level (instead of five). Since characters only reach somewhere around level 15 in the game, that means they can completely learn two or three skills if they want, or they can spread the wealth around.
The nice thing about the new character system is that it gives you all sorts of options for how to put your party together. In the original Grimrock, just about every party consisted of two fighters, one rogue and a wizard, or one fighter, two rogues and a wizard, and the races didn't have much of an impact. But now the races and classes provide significant differences. With two points in the Accuracy skill, characters can use melee weapons from the back row, and so you can have a party of only minotaur fighters if you want. Or you might want to paste enemies from afar and use four ratling rogues instead. I didn't notice any discussions about the "best" party for the original Grimrock, but for the sequel I've seen a few, and they usually end up heated.
Combat
Legend of Grimrock II like its predecessor doesn't have much in the way of a story. You find yourself on a beach at the start of the game, and you just fight monsters and solve puzzles because they're there -- in abundance -- and because they frequently reward you with some nice loot. Not a whole lot has changed in the way that combat and the puzzles work, but it's clear that developer Almost Human took some notes about how people played the original Grimrock, and they made some improvements for the sequel.
Let me start with combat. Grimrock II is played in real time on a square grid. You move from square to square, and when you're facing an opponent, you can attack it. To attack, you just right-click on a character's weapon (shown next to their portrait in the lower right-hand corner of the screen), and then you wait for a cooldown so you can attack again. With four characters and dual-wielding allowed, this can be a lot of clicking, but since the cooldowns are usually in the range of 3-6 seconds, it's not too bad.
Spellcasters are a little more complicated, because for them to cast spells, they have to select the runes for a spell, and then activate the spell. In the original Grimrock, this frequently involved four clicks (or more) per spell, which provided a workout (and is one reason why parties only had one wizard). But now in Grimrock II, you can make "gestures" to cast spells. This sounded worrisome to me when I first read about it because I thought I was going to have to draw weird symbols in the air. In reality, it just gives you an easier way of selecting runes. Instead of clicking on them individually, you can simply run your mouse over them, and so casting now just requires a swipe and a click.
Special attacks on weapons also changed. Instead of the attacks happening automatically whenever a character has enough energy for them, you can now select when they occur. To do this, you have to "charge" the attack by holding down the right mouse button on a weapon. Then when you release the button, you also release the attack. This change only sorta-kinda worked for me. I like choosing when special attacks happen, but the charging process is often slow, and the Grimrock games are all about making quick hits and avoiding damage, and so I didn't use them all that often. For some reason, special attacks also frequently missed for me, making them even less desirable.
Finally, if you played the original Grimrock, then you no doubt remember "dancing" with your opponents. If you got into a 2x2 area of the map with an enemy, then you could just move to the opposite corner from it, wait for it to move towards you, and then hit it and retreat to the opposite corner again, and repeat as necessary. This allowed you to kill just about everything, provided there weren't multiple enemies around.
Well, apparently Almost Human didn't like this very much. Enemies are much more likely to have ranged attacks now, many jump and dodge out of the way, the maps (even the outside ones) don't have many large areas to fight in, and enemies frequently come at you more than one at a time. These changes make combat different and more difficult, and they require "dancing" of a different sort, as you frequently have to dodge and retreat while you look for a place where you can fight safely.
Grimrock II also has many more boss fights than the original Grimrock. You encounter a boss creature on the very first map, and then you see them every few hours over the rest of the game. The boss fights are challenging because they always involve multiple enemies, but there's also usually a trick to them so if you fight smartly, you can survive. That being said, I didn't enjoy the final boss fight at all. That's a fight where you almost have to know what's coming -- and build your party accordingly -- in order to defeat it. My party wasn't especially great for it, and I had to load my game dozens of times to get through it.
To help you out with the increased difficulty of the combat, Almost Human made some changes to help keep the game playable. For starters, each character can now have two weapon sets, which is useful because in some cases DPS is important, while in others big hits are better (there are also places where it's useful to keep a shovel or a harpoon as a backup weapon). Characters no longer have to hit an enemy to get the full xp for it; all surviving characters get full xp no matter what, so you no longer have to fight sub-optimally so you can get everybody involved. And resting is much faster now than it was in the first game. Resting from nearly dead to full health only takes a few seconds, so there's not a lot of downtime while healing.
Unfortunately, other parts of the game didn't see the same improvements. For example, potions can now be stacked, which is helpful, but you still have to go to the inventory page for a character, find the potion you want, and then right click on it to quaff it -- which isn't a lot of fun if you're in the middle of a fight and also trying to maneuver and attack. If nothing else, opening the inventory page blocks a chunk of your view. I'm sort of surprised that Almost Human didn't designate a couple of "belt slots" for characters, so the items would show up next to the character's portraits and be easier to use. As it is now, Grimrock II's interface is still a little clunky to use, and the battles might prove a challenge to you if you don't have a good amount of manual dexterity. I was pretty much at the limit of my clicking ability to get through the fights, which is a shame since the puzzle part of the game is slower and more thoughtful.
Puzzles
The puzzles in Grimrock II use a lot of the same mechanics as in the first game. That is, they rely on levers, pressure plates, secret buttons, teleporters, trap doors, and grates, and they require you to decipher obscure clues and solve riddles. If you played the original Grimrock, then you might wonder how there could possibly be dozens more of these types of puzzle -- and perhaps you might worry that you're only going to see the "leftovers" from the first game -- but the puzzles are great. These days I almost exclusively play RPGs and adventures, and I'm usually pretty good at puzzles, but for a few of the ones in the game, I had to seek help.
As an example of a puzzle, at one point you come to something called the "Runemaster's Trial." I'm going to give some information about this puzzle, so if you don't want to see it, then skip ahead to the next paragraph. Anyway, the puzzle involves a 3x3 grid of pressure plates, a closed gate, and a magic "gun" that shoots spells. Since runes are what you use to cast spells, and since they're presented in a 3x3 grid in the interface, and since the puzzle is showing you spells, there are plenty of hints to give you an idea about how to solve the puzzle -- and claim the prize on the other side of the gate.
Most of the puzzles have names, which is nice because that makes it much easier to search for information about them without seeing all sorts of other (and probably spoilerish) information. The puzzles are also friendly in that they're not as action-oriented as they were in the original Grimrock, which had a lot of sequences where you'd have to press a button, then run to a temporarily closed trap door, then press another button, and so forth. For the most part, if a lever or pressure plate closes a door in Grimrock II, then it stays closed until you do something else. So the puzzles are more about being clever and solving problems rather than running around quickly.
Along with the puzzles, there are also numerous secrets in the game. Some of the secrets are associated with puzzles, and so they're not too tough to find, but others reside in out of the way dark corners of the maps, and you have to explore carefully (scanning every wall for secret buttons) to find them. Since Grimrock II takes place on an island, there are also some pirate-themed activities (ratlings are presented as pirates), which means you get to find treasure maps and dig for buried treasures. I thought I was being pretty thorough in the game, but when I got to the end, I had only found about 80% of the secrets and treasures.
Most of the loot in the game comes from solving puzzles. Enemies, if anything, tend to drop food. Grimrock II has an almost entirely new selection of gear over the original game, and it even has some new types of equipment. For example, there are now firearms available, which either shoot pellets (which disappear after being used) or cannonballs (which don't). There are also equipment sets now, where wearing the whole set gives a character a small bonus.
Finally, in a nice change, after you defeat the final boss, the game doesn't end. If you find yourself (like me) missing a few secrets and whatnot, then you can continue to explore the island and search for them. The final boss even drops a "master key," which unlocks all of the doors on the island, making your travels easier.
Graphics and Sound
Grimrock II is a budget-ish title, so it shouldn't be surprising to learn that it is limited in what it does with graphics and sound. The sound in particular is bare bones. There isn't any spoken dialogue, and there are pretty much only the required number of musical tracks and sounds effects, with no more and no less. I'm mostly fine with this -- I'd much rather Almost Human spends time and money creating clever puzzles rather than hiring somebody to narrate the letters you find during your explorations -- but more ambient noises and some variety to the other sound effects would help to make it feel like you're exploring a real, breathing world rather than just playing a computer game.
The graphics, on the other hand, impressed me a little, probably because I was expecting more of the one-tone drabness from the original Grimrock. But the beaches, rivers, and forests are colored vividly, there are day and night cycles complete with an animated sky, you can explore underwater which looks completely different than exploring on land, there are some mist and fog effects that make the cemetery and bog maps more distinct, and there are even opening and closing movies. I don't think Grimrock II is going to win any graphical awards or anything, but it sure looks much nicer now.
Performance
It took me about 40 hours to play through Grimrock II, and during that time I didn't notice any bugs. All of the puzzles were solvable, all of the skills and bonuses worked like they were described, and the game didn't crash even once. The only downside to Grimrock II is that its world is bigger and more complex now, and so save and load times take about five times as long. If you played the original Grimrock, then you might not even have noticed when the game auto-saved, but now you can definitely feel the pause, and load times are even slower. These down times aren't disastrously long, but they make some of the battles and puzzles even more frustrating than they would have been otherwise, especially when it feels like you're staring at the loading screen more than you're playing the game.
Conclusion
Overall, I enjoyed Legend of Grimrock II pretty well. It's a satisfying game with an equal balance between thoughtful puzzles and frantic combat. It's also well-constructed with a fine attention to detail, and it looks like a real game now rather than just an indie production. Plus, it's challenging, even on the normal difficulty setting. So if you're looking for a way to spend some of your free time, and if puzzles are a plus rather than a negative, then Grimrock II is a good way to go.
