Out today.
I got mine! It came with a notebook filled with graph paper for some reason
Have to say I was really excited for this game up til about two days ago where the fans have been giving me weird vibes about it. All this time I was under the impression that the love for the original was built on a foundation of earnest appreciation for what the game was trying to do with all the game's goofiness and technical quirks acting as a slab of icing on top.
Now since the reviews are coming out people are celebrating the game having a worst framerate than the original, and talking about how they hope it's a bigger "trainwreck" and SWERY has even been RTing some of this crap with sunglasses emojis and uh...now I'm sitting here worried that the fanbase was a bunch of irony jerks the whole time. I'm hoping he's just having fun with it and the sequel hasn't tried to give these jerks what they think they want.
Anyway when do I ever care about what people are saying about a game on release day, I sure will be playing this all weekend either way!
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@Lesmocon#3057 Anyway when do I ever care about what people are saying about a game on release day
That's the spirit.
I'm still waiting for my physical copy to arrive! I regret buying a physical release for switch. OOPS
I‘m enjoying it, but its definitely not entirely lived up to the original, but I’m still very happy it exists. I‘m only a few hours in, just passed the first Premonition segment. I’m finding it hysterical and plan on finishing it at least once, and probably replaying one after I finish it, but the technical issues do hurt it a little more than anything in the first one harmed it, but I do get that with its budget that it was bound to have some issues. The charm might not match the first, but its still there and there isn't anything else I can think of that being produced current day that matches that particular type of charm or appeal.
I finished it last night and I did have a good time with the story and revisiting my friends York and Zach but man. Those bugs, dude. That performance. It got to a point where I was doing basically zero side content just to try to dodge the gamebreaking bugs, some breaking long and already tedious quests. I‘m glad this thing got made but wow it’s hard to recommend somebody go out and play this right now for $50 when it‘s in the state that it’s in.
If you liked the first one you'll like getting some more time with those characters for sure but man I had to overclock the heck out of my switch to get it up to even a sometimes playable framerate. If you're not desperate for something to play right now I'd definitely hold off until it's either fixed, ported to something that can make up for the technical problems, or cheaper. It's really hard to justify that pricetag when it's in such a sorry state while being scaled back from the original as well.
In case anyone has been wondering, the PC port of the game is, in fact, playable, which seems to be quite an improvement over the Switch version which I skipped. Even Toybox's port of the original game struggled to run on the Switch, with worse framerate drops than the original on the Xbox 360, and bizarre bugs, such as the fact that the button to quit races was the same as the button for the accelerator, meaning that you had to take every race at full throttle from beginning to end, since letting go and then reapplying would quit the race. Thankfully this turned out to be possible due to the new handling physics for the cars, which was different from the original in a way that was neither better or worse.
I started the second game with minimal expectations, and was pleasantly surprised by the initial frame story and the game's opening hours. The new setting is interesting and there's a slightly different take on York's character, both when he's older and younger, that recasts the original story in kind of an interesting way. I like the skateboard, although I wish you could do some of the tricks he claims to have learned, or at least do an Ollie, because the traversal quickly becomes dull. The game immediately does something I hated in _The Good Life_, which is split the "main quest" into two different objectives that each start their own chain of events. Hard to say yet whether this takes it to the same extent as that game, but it has the potential to totally destroy the pacing.
Speaking of pacing, the game feels significantly overwritten, more wordy than the first game. The characters just go on and on when the joke has already come and gone. You can skip most of the dialogue, just reading the subtitles, which I've already started to do with every character aside from York and Patti, whose voice actors I think are putting in good performances.
About two hours in, I've encountered a situation where I have to wait several hours for an event to trigger, and have noticed that time moves significantly more slowly than in the first game, and that cigarettes seem to skip less time as well, which is curious. I thought it might have been similar to the first game where you will automatically quit smoking if you get too hungry, but my meter was almost full, so I'm not sure what happened.
I'm a major devotee of the first game so it's surprising that it took me so long to start this one, but everything I heard about the technical problems, as well as my disappointments with Swery's subsequent releases, didn't make me especially enthusiastic. I suppose I will continue to update this thread with my impressions as I carry on, because I've gotta do _something!_ Or else I'm not doing anything at all.
If this is the bit where you have to wait until you can get some beans for the woman at the bowling alley then I ended up making York tired, going to sleep, and fighting the night time goons for five nights straight to trigger the event. Unfortunately it meant having to sit through several minute-long loading screens every day. Utterly excruciating.
I really enjoyed Dead Prem 2 and don't remember any of that waiting about. Did I block it out?
As I was playing it, I kept thinking that if they'd had another 6 months, they could have really done something. The skeleton is there but the meat is hanging off it at odd angles. It needed an edit, some variety in the combat (or cutting of the combat) and some optimisation. The frame rate after the first patch really didn't bother me but it'd be nice if it ran better so that the discourse could be about the game and not the technical aspects as there is a lot to love in it. I really enjoyed the otherworldly vibe of a bizarrely constructed game world.
I was always surprised that Origins and 2 never got ported to other consoles.
I’ll be playing it on PC then. Felt guilty about giving up on it on a switch lite, where it ran at 8 FPS and I needed a jewelers loupe to read the text
The game is 65% off on Steam up until the 13th of March, so probably not a bad time to look into it if you‘re curious. That’s what got me off the fence.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that I miss Agent Honor so bad. Even though they're just stupid floating medals worth $5, they're at least something to gather when you poke around the back of a building while just wandering around. Their replacement with crafting materials that you seem to dig out of the ground (this at least made sense in _The Good Life_, where you play as a dog) is very disappointing.
That being said, the first time the "wandering around" music from the first game started playing while York looks in the mirror and takes his iconic idle pose did get me bouncing-in-my-seat excited. So I'm really being torn in half with this one.
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bonk
Makes me feel like I should go back and finish this.
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