Once upon a time in the magical land of April, 2012, there was a Finnish Indie Game developer called Almost Human Ltd. They took the world by storm with their first game, an ambitious RPG known as Legend of Grimrock. This game was meant to resurrect the cult classic RPG sub-genre known as “Dungeon Crawlers”. Dungeon Crawlers were CRPGs from the 90s that often used lore, monsters, locations, and character creation from Dungeons&Dragons. These were always first person games, and involved you and your party of (usually) four characters roaming through dungeons (no kidding?), solving puzzles, and fighting horrible creatures. Unfortunately, this genre all but died out once 3D started becoming common in computer games. But when Almost Human came around, they claimed their game, Legend of Grimrock would be the second coming of Dungeon Crawlers, catching the attention of people like myself, who had fond memories with this specific RPG style. LoG was basically an instant success, gaining insane amounts of praise for it’s graphics, gameplay, puzzles, and of course, the nostalgic value.
I’m going to run the risk of offending a ridiculous amount of people and say I didn’t enjoy the original Legend of Grimrock very much. I found it to be amazing at first, but soon the novelty of it’s nostalgic feel wore off, and I soon realized it was incredibly repetitive, had an unnecessarily frustrating difficulty spike, and to boot, the ending was stupid and anticlimactic. But that is not the game we’re talking about, and I’ll leave my opinions as they stand, right there.
So when Legend of Grimrock II was announced, my curiosity was instantly piqued. From the screenshots and gameplay trailer, it looked like a step up as far as the amount of locations you could visit and enemies you could fight, which was one of my biggest, if not THE biggest problem I had with Grimrock 1. Morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I decided I wanted to try the game, just to see if it was any better. Long story short: It was. By a huge margin.
The story in Legend of Grimrock 2, like the first game, is incredibly simple, and has next to no plot development at all. You play as four prisoners on a ship. The ship is his by a storm and ends up crashing into a bunch of rocks near an island. By nothing but dumb luck, the cage our prisoners are in floats on the water and lands on the island’s beach. This is where the game starts, on the Isle of Nex. Soon you find letters left lying around, from someone named “The Island Master”. The Master leaves you clues here and there for puzzles, and sometimes tells you about certain parts of the island, but mostly, he just mocks you. Most of the letters you find laying around from him involve him telling you how stupid you are and how you’re going to die. I found it to be entertaining, and it added a bit of personality to the game. After a little while, you’ll stumble upon a shrine, where these giant stone heads, known as Stone Philosophers, tell you about these things called power gems, and how they can be fused together in a shrine to form an essence of one of the four elements. Each shrine you find throughout the island corresponds to an element, the first of which being Fire. Most of the game takes you throughout the island, searching for these power gems, so you can make all four Essences and progress to the end of the game.
The gameplay in Legend of Grimrock 2 is almost entirely unchanged from the first game, which is almost no different than the Dungeon Crawlers of old. In the game, you create a party of four characters, each with special traits and skills, with a wide selection of races to choose from. Legend of Grimrock 2 introduces a few new races, including Lizardmen and Ratmen, and a few new classes, such as the Battlemage, the Farmer, and the Alchemist. The Alchemist is a pretty neat class. They specialize in making potions, and firearms. Yes, firearms. This game introduces them as a new ranged weapon. At first I was taken back by this idea, but quickly grew to like the addition. Don’t worry, we’re not using M16’s or AK47’s, the firearms in Legend of Grimrock resemble things like Flintlock pistols and the like.
The game is entirely grid-based, which means yourself and all enemies take up exactly one “tile” in the gameworld. This is how all dungeon crawlers have been, so if you don’t like a lack of free movement, you may not like this. However, if you hold the right mouse button, you can look around freely, which really lets you soak in the beautiful environments in this game.(and there’s a lot of those)
One of my biggest issues with Grimrock 1 was the lack of interesting enemies. I can maybe count all of them (that doesn’t include reskins) on one to one and a half hands. Grimrock 2 introduced a huge bestiary in comparison. Some classic enemies from the original game are back, like the skeleton warriors, the Herders, (Mushroom people) and everybody’s favorite, the Ogre\Troll\Whatever things.
One very annoying issue I had with this game was the load times. Loading games takes a ridiculous amount of time, sometimes up to 30 seconds just to load one saved game. I also encountered a few crashes while loading. Overall, the loading proved to be an annoyance.
Combat is performed by right clicking on a weapon in one of your party member’s hands. Some skills allow you to hold one weapon in each hand, thus allowing one character to attack two times. Your party is formed in a sort of square, with two characters in front, and two in back. Unless they have a required skill, characters in the back cannot use melee attacks, and must resort to spells or ranged weapons.
After each attack, your weapon has a cool down. The cool down lasts a few seconds, and varies from weapon to weapon. Generally, the larger the weapon, the slower the cool down. There stems a problem from this, though. Enemies do not suffer the same sort of cool down effect. In fact, most enemies will attack you mercilessly, several times in rapid succession, doing massive damage to your party. There were several times where I had each of my characters attack one enemy, and then the enemy would perform around 7 attacks within split seconds of each other, giving me absolutely no time to react at all, and since my weapons were cooling down, I just had to sit and take it. This is where the “Dance of Death” comes in. Since movement is grid based, you can sort of strafe around enemies, to avoid letting them attack you. Since you’re locked to squares, you cannot attack diagonally, and your enemies must face you to attack you. Essentially, one of the key survival tactics of any dungeon crawler is to circle the enemy over and over, faster than they can turn to you. Cheap, I know. To an extent, Grimrock’s enemies are smart enough to keep you from doing this to a degree. They’ll usually try to keep up with you, and certain enemies will move around in strange patterns to keep you from taking advantage to how the movement system works.
Bosses are a new thing in Grimrock 2. Grimrock 1 only had one final boss, and don’t even get me started on that idiotic thing. The bosses are fairly spaced out in this game, but incredibly difficult. Many times I had to reload games, and many times I would just barely win by the skin of my teeth.
Puzzles are a huge part of Dungeon Crawlers, and Grimrock 2 is no stranger to them. One problem with Grimrock 1 that more people than just myself had, was that the puzzles were slightly uninspired, and weren’t very challenging. Grimrock 2, on the other hand, has a huge variety of different puzzles, all of which are challenging enough to tickle your brain, but not so challenging that you’ll want to rip your hair out. The sort of puzzles that make you go “Ohhhhhh!” when you figure them out.
Legend of Grimrock 2 has a lot of secrets, too. Most of which are found by solving optional puzzles, or sometimes following clues and maps to find buried treasure. Unlike Grimrock 1, the majority of the secrets do not involve scanning the walls obsessively looking for secret buttons. Those are present, but they’re scaled back tremendously, and noticeably easier to spot, which in my opinion is a good thing.
One thing I absolutely hate, though, is the locked chest mechanic. I forget exactly if Grimrock 1 had this, but in this game, some chests have padlocks, and require lockpicks to open. Sounds fine at first, but then you realize that lockpicks are the only way to open locked chests, and that they’re also scarce as the day is long. To make matters worse, lockpicks are one time uses. Use one, and it’s gone forever. What’s annoying is the fact that most of the time when I would find a treasure chest, it’d be locked, and I’d have to mark it on my map so I could remember where it was when I found another lockpick, then I’d have to trek all the way back to the chest, and by then, the excitement of finding treasure has long worn off, and most of the time, it isn’t even worth it by that point in time, as I usually surpassed the value of what’s inside the chest by leveling up enough and getting better equipment. I found this whole mechanic entirely stupid and frustrating. A simple skill set for lockpicking would have been a lot better. Maybe with each level put into the skill, you gain a small chance of being able to keep the lockpick after use, and eventually never losing them at all. Maybe that gets rid of the challenge and fun for some, but for me, it would’ve gotten rid of lots of busywork. Even the ability for your melee users to be able to smash open the locks if their weapon specialization were high enough would’ve been good, too.
The graphics in Legend of Grimrock 2 are phenomenal. Although I’m not a huge buff on graphics, and I can’t point out minor little things that are wrong with a game’s graphics, but this game is incredibly good looking, especially for an indie title. The lighting, textures, and models are all top notch, and really add to the atmosphere and feel of crawling around in a dank crypt, a haunted cemetery, or a dark forest.
My biggest problem with Legend of Grimrock 1, as I said before, was the severe lack of interesting enemies and locations. There were only 3 different “locations” in Grimrock 1, and each was just a different looking cave wall. Grimrock 2 has an almost staggering amount of different places to explore, and while there still are some dank caves and ruins, there are enough differences between Cave A and Cave B that it doesn’t end up getting annoying. One ruin has you solving puzzles, and one ruin takes you through a sewer infested with ratmen. There’s even a dang pyramid level in this game, I mean how cool is that? The different outdoor locations are absolutely stunning. Many times I just stood and looked around. The world really feels alive, much more so than the cave wall after cave wall of Grimrock 1.
Legend of Grimrock II is a staggering step up in quality from the last game, what worked in the last game, they refined to make even better, and what didn’t work, was mostly addressed. The different locations are absolutely gorgeous to look at, the puzzles are well thought out, and the combat is punishing, to an almost annoying degree, but still very satisfying. And to boot, this game is pretty dang long, too. Not ridiculously so, but Almost Human claims there’s about 20+ hours of gameplay. For an RPG, this may not seem like much, but it didn’t bother me much, as the game took a little over a week to complete. Overall, this game is certainly worth the $24 price tag, especially if you’re a fan of the last game.