izigame.me

This is a "preliminary" semi-final review as I did not finish the game yet.
I have just arrived at the presumably last area of the game, and I had to put it down for now since neither the gameplay nor the graphics are holding up and frankly I have lost the appetite to play it, without forcing myself to do so.
It really is a shame, since I LOVED the first game, but this ain't it anymore.
World and Exploration
The new approach with a more open world to explore and uncover lore and solve puzzles sounds nice in theory when first starting with the game ("So many things to see!"), but as is the curse of open world games, they can and will turn into a grindy slog if not done right.
Sadly in this game, it seems the devs took too much "inspiration" from Ubisoft, as the open world is littered with questions marks to explore, like ticking items off a checklist.
It even has these "unlock towers to see further on the map" mechanics.
The rewards for doing these "chores" are very basic and don't really feel like they are worth it.
Running from one point of interest to the next takes quite some time. I reckon about 70% of the game is just running from A to B, and while the scenery can* be quite beautiful it's not enough to stave off the boredom sometimes.
I hope your Shift-Key is still in good shape, since there is no toggleable sprint!
Character Development
The playable fox character is very cute and to my surprise can be customized quite a lot with a character editor just like in an RPG, which gave me quite the chuckle at first.
For cosmetics, there are different selectable and unlockable skins.
The game further contains some more lightweight RPG elements as well, namely a skill tree and equippable runes.
The skill tree can enhance several aspects of your character permanently, from simple things like health and spirit points ("mana"), to enhancing special talents or better currency collection.
The runes you can equip grant you special abilities or enhance basic abilities with greater effects, but so far there are not that many of them.
Unlockables and Currency
The game has a basic currency system (essence and wisps). Essence so far is only needed for unlocking Monoliths (a.k.a. the "Ubisoft towers") and buy a very limited selection of equippable runes or cosmetic skins.
Wisps are bit more annoying. You can only carry a handful (pawful?) of them at a time.
And you also need to chase them down most of the time which gets annoying fast.
When you are full, you can't pick up any more. The problem with this is that sometimes you will get wisps as exploration reward, and if you're full already than means the reward is basically lost.
Fortunately you can store essence and wisps at your houses/safezones in a bank and retrieve them later.
Wisps are furthermore only used to unlock doors or mechanisms or restore some trees, meaning you'll use a bunch of them at a time, but with much time inbetween. You'll have to strike a balance between carrying enough for such occasions, but not enough to be maxed out all the time since then you can't collect more of them.
Other rewards include skill points, lore fragments and skill runes.
Story (no spoilers)
So far the story is nothing to write home about and it is quite predictable.
I really like nordic themes but this combined with the tedious long open world stretching everything out, it's ... just boring.
Unlockable lore fragments are interesting for about 10 seconds each, but nothing here is really surprising or unique in any way.
There are some short story related "bossfights" in it as well, but those are very easy to beat.
I'm not "done" with the game, but so far it was very weak story and lore-wise.

Technical side (performance / graphics fidelity)

The technical side, specifically performance and image quality are anywhere between decent and abysmal, compared to the first title.
I said earlier that "it can be quite beautiful" and is true.
But with every new area this diminishes. And when I arrived at the last area of the game it hit me in the face.
It looks BAD, while simultaneously still running horrendously.
I invite you to watch this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_b4hHlmxec
It seriously often looks worse than the first game, with horrible LOD models on trees popping in and out of existance (03:23), nonexistent ground foliage and sub-par textures (mountains at the beginning).
I'm by NO MEANS someone that needs the best graphics ever, quite the opposite, but when even then the image quality suffers with blurryness and artifacting, as well as running with horrible FPS I draw the line.
I'd rather play old games that at least can still run at 144 FPS with crisp clarity (like SOTN1).
For a simple benchmark and comparison to the first game:
My PC: i7-14700k, RTX4070 Ti Super, 64GB of DDR5 RAM.
The first game is normally locked to 60 FPS, but can be easily unlocked for unlimited FPS, which I have done for this comparison.
Spirit of the North 1
Max Settings (Ultra) @ 1440p native
Runs at 220 FPS (!), well over my monitors refresh rate.
Game still looks gorgeous, and is IMHO comparable with SOTN 2 on Medium to High settings.
Buttery smooth camera panning, crisp motion clarity, no image blur or ghosting artifacts, fur detail is very good with no visible graphics issues (although a bit "wobbly" in the wind).
No further tweaks of settings needed to get the best experience.
Spirit of the North 2
Medium(!) settings @ 1440p native (100% resolution scale)
Runs at 55 FPS, measly by comparison
Acceptable framerate, but far off from my monitors refreshrate of 144Hz.
Mandatory Temporal Anti-Aliasing causes ghosting artifacts that are perceptible around your character and other moving objects. Motion clarity is impacted while turning the camera, washing out details during movement, and then reappearing only after a slight delay, making for a somewhat jarring experience.
Fur rendering is bad, especially on Medium and lower settings, showing black shine-through of the character model, depending on the view angle.
Global illumination on medium settings causes very noisy light shimmering in dark spots with few light sources.
If you're susceptible to one or more of these issues (like me) it makes for an objectively worse experience than SOTN 1, even with comparable graphics.
The Culprit
It is no secret that Unreal Engine 5 almost always produces heavy to run games, even when creating them with comparable graphics to, say, an Unreal Engine 4 game (like SOTN 1 is).
The crux with the new engine is that in theory it can produce better effects and lighting, but at an immense cost of GPU power. And the underlying rendering pipeline is built from the ground up with these effect in mind, like Global Illumination or Nanite etc. Even when you are not using these "modern" features, TAA is still basically the default with all of it's trade-offs, other AAs that do not produce the blur or ghosting downsides are flat out not easily possible anymore.
And no matter the feature-set, we are getting nowhere near the FPS of older titles not relying on TAA/RT/Global Illumination, despite those still looking AND running great.
Sadly with the mass adoption of UE5 these "modern" features are here to stay.
As someone who has played many games released from the 1990s all the way to now, this new trend on solely relying on a single engine with all it's shortcomings is worrying. Every game starts to look and perform the same (badly).
Sure, new devs will have an easier time developing games with UE5 since it's become the defacto standard, but at what cost? Will there ever be well performing optimized games with sharp image clarity again? Or will we just slap on more AI and call it a day?
Maybe also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LvxG5zbSK0