Disappointing in so many ways. This is one sequel that does not even come close to matching its predecessor...
Gameplay: What gameplay? Run from A to B. Watch a conversation or cut scene. Maybe pick up an item. Not surwe what to do? Don't worry the characters will all but tell you how to solve the problem.. all 4 problems you come across the whole game. This had the gameplay style of a game meant for toddlers, but with dialogue obviously meant for intelligent adults. Look folks, if you want to make a movie instead of game then your quality had better be up there with Pixar.
As for the problems/puzzles you do have to solve, they are either one or the other: too easy to mention or too difficult to bother with. And there are not many of them. One such puzzle involved using a few buttons to mimic a short melody, however there is no way to repeat the melody without reloading a saved game (no way that I could find anyways) so even though I "solved" the puzzle, I had to cheat to get by it.
As for the simpler puzzles or item based problems, the game is played in a series of closed environments, and eerytime you move to a new chapter and new environment, your inventory clears out of everythign you don't need. So basicvalyl there are only a few items you can actually pick up and you pretty much KNOW you need them to solve the ONE problem in that environment.
Give the gamer a little respect!
Story: The story here has been getting alot of praise, but I'm going the other route here: I'm disappointed. If the writers had a solid binding plot under there, then they did not communicate. What I saw was a series of events strung together with no real binding elements ever shown. Characters flitted in and out. Hamfisted acting and writing was used to tell us things rather than show us. Certain characters repeated certain words and phrases so often that they were very difficult to believe.
It wuld have been much easier to buy into the character relationships and setting if they had done more "show me" and less "tell me." I won't get into more detail here so as no to spoil anything, but there isn't much in my opinion to spoil, it's not like they explain anything in the end.
Basically the story is at points so glaring that they force you to understand things and thus you don't really buy in on an emotiional level, and other times so insanely ambiguous that i am fairly certainthe writers really didn't know how to tie the points together so they just decided to not try and that we the audience would assume it was "subtlety."
Look nobody likes a complainer, but honestly this game has been getting so much praise that I felt I needed to take the negative route.
Th story would have been fine if we had much better gameplay, but as it was I conidered this a movie that required me to move the character along. In that light, this story does not hold a candle to most CG movie out there today.