Infinity Blade II improves greatly upon it's sequel, and proves to be one of the best looking portable games to date.
The Bad: Rebirthing still feels repetitive and tedious, no map, still can't go backwards, a little on the short side
Infinity Blade II fixes a lot of issues I have with the first game, but a few still remain. The story is fleshed out more with more voice acting and several cut scenes. The story has a twist ending and actually feels satisfying making you want the next game. Siris has the Infinity Blade, but has discovered that the God King still lives. He needs to open three seals to free The Worker so he can get to the God King.
My biggest issue was that progression in the first game was way too slow. It took forever to level up enough to face tougher enemies mainly because the God King was the only boss. In this game I beat it at level 25 and was able to get enough gold to get the best stuff in the game without having to buy gold with real cash. This makes the game a lot more fun, but fans of the difficulty from the last game may find this one too easy. I was able to beat the game in about 4 hours time with only 9 rebirths.
Even though you can get the good stuff fairly quickly there is less of it. There is probably just over 10 items for each category, but we can do more with it. You can infuse gems in slots on certain armor and weapon pieces that will give you perks like more gold dropping, extra XP, and even more damage or healing on scratches or certain sized enemies. You can't sell the items anymore, so once you have bought it you are stuck with it. You can sell gems, so that makes up for it a little. I am guessing you can't sell items anymore because the gold acquiring rate has increased to the point where being able to sell items would be almost cheating.
One cool thing added was the ability to use different sized keys for chests. The area you wonder around is about twice the size of the last game so there is some pretty good loot lying around like tons of gold and some higher end items. There is even an area with locked away weapons that require you to acquire certain store items as keys. There is reward for going down different paths now and they are bigger than you think. One item I like are the prize wheels that you can buy from the store which will randomly give you any item that exists in the store no matter how expensive. There are also shield and health regens as well which really help during boss fights.
The combat itself has improved and doesn't require such precise timing and stroke direction. You can parry right when the enemy attacks and it will still work instead of having to do it right before being hit. There are now good and perfect parries which lead into XP bonuses you can get during combat. These XP bonuses will ask you to do a certain amount of blocks, perfect parries or blocks, or even not blocking at all. These can get pretty tedious after a while though and never really change all that often. Other than that the spells and supers are still the same as well as how you level up.
The visuals are some of the best ever seen outside the Vita. Chair still has the best use of the Unreal Engine for iOS and sucks every bit of power out of your device. The textures look amazing and so do the lighting effects. The music is great as well as the voice acting, so this is probably the highest budget mobile phone game I have ever seen. Still, the one underlying issue remains. Rebirthing gets annoying especially if you die at a boss. The tower is almost labyrinthine and no map was provided. I also don't like the fact that you can't go back after selecting a wrong path. These are probably the biggest issues still remaining. Clash Mob, however, is an excellent multiplayer feature that has huge enemies that have hundreds of thousands of hit points that players can log into and try to whittle down it's health. The player with the final blow gets a huge prize while everyone who participated get something as well. This could be revolutionary and I hope other games catch on.
Overall, Infinity Blade II improves and adds a ton of things this time around. The story will draw you in, the graphics are phenomenal, and the gameplay is addictive and exciting. If you loved the first game then you will freak out over this one. Newcomers will be treated to one of the best mobile games ever made. I just hope they fix the repetitive rebirthing element and give us a map in the next game.