The Talos Principle: Reawakened Review (Saucin')
The game kept crashing on launch, giving me fatal error, but after updating my drivers everything was fine. The performance is okay ish, with heavy stuttering after reloading a puzzle and in the vast areas (which is pretty much the whole game). The engine itself is nice, but I preffer the original more. Sometimes there's this bland fog around the place, really sucking life out of everything.
I don't really care about the map creation, so i leave that one out. But what i care about is the DLC "In the beginning", a prequel to the first game, where Alexandra Drennan and her team is doing everything in their power to get the simulation working. And it's so damn boring.
Very mild spoilers ahead!
First, DLC is hard. All the areas are red puzzle pieces and on par with Gehenna levels in terms of difficulty. Which is not a problem by itself, BUT! some areas could only be solved with "out-of-bounds" approach to the level, like putting a connector to a place you can reach only by jumping around, scaling some statues and appear on top of the outer wall of the arena. Such approach is fine if you are collecting bonus stars or whatever, but this is no longer about puzzles.
Second - DLC is boring. You hear Alexandra and her team trying to finish their work before they all die. But it's all just really uninteresting yapping and complaining. Besides that Alex is talking to Elohim, whom she is trying to prepare to overlook the simulation in the future. He is asking questions like "Why all administrators (people) will be gone?", just to get the same "We screwed up against the chaos of nature", and "What defines a human?" over and over again. Would be interesting if we didn't go through all that in the first game already.
Third - I don't know why the hubs with puzzle areas have to be so damn big? The engine is nice to look at and all that jazz, yes, but it's the same vast and empty concept of areas we saw in the second game. Plus the performance suffers because of it, so...
Fourth - you start in the tower from the first game and there is a door in front of you, requiring 4 red tetrominos to get through. So you turn around and get outside. There are 3 portals to the lands we know from the first game - Egypt, Greece, and medieval Europe. In each land there are these pretty difficult areas I was talking about. So I started collected tetrominos and after 4 hours of solving i got around 6 (2 more than I needed, but what the hell). So I returned to the tower and punched the pieces in, and after the door opened, there was.... another door, requiring 6 tetrominos this time. I mean what the actual F@CK?
At that point I resigned. I was forcing myself to go through those 4 hours just to know what's behind the door anyway. The game simply isn't interesting enough. At least not enough for me to push myself through all those red puzzles. It doesn't have the mystery and appeal of the first game. When I played the first one, I wanted to know what's next, what the next tower level will bring, what interesting piece of info will I read, etc. Here all I get is the next door. Well, that was bloody stupid.
If you want to kill some time and solve some really hard puzzles, go right ahead., but be prepared for occasional performance issues. But if you are here for at least a bit of the magic the first game had, you are knocking on the wrong tetromino-locked door.