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I was extremely surprised when The Talos Principle 2 was announced, because I thought it did not sell too well to warrant a sequel, being a niche game, but here we are almost 40 hours after doing 100% in the game and it's safe to say I am super glad they decided to make a new one. The Talos Principle 2 is a fantastic sequel to an already fantastic puzzle game and while it's not perfect, which I'll detail below, I still want more.


👍 The good parts:
+Excellent puzzle designs that range from easy to hard difficulty.
+Amazing soundtrack.
+Stunning vistas and architectural design

👎The bad parts:
-The maps are too large and tedious to go from one puzzle to another.
-Dialogue system

The Talos Principle is a direct sequel to the second game so I would highly recommend you play the first as well, but it's not that mandatory as there are short recaps in the game. You wake up as the number 1000 android created by what the first android, the character you played in the first game, set out to do following the paths of Alexandra. Shortly after you wake up things start to go weird and you're off to explore a new and mysterious island filled with tons of puzzles created for an unknown reason.

I obviously can't talk much without spoiling, but the gist is, that the story holds the same moral choices the first game gave you, about what it means to be human and their decisions.

It's a pretty decent story, it will certainly make you rethink certain aspects of your own life, very philosophical stuff. What's different from the first is that now you seem to have certain dialogue choices that can impact the multiple endings the game has, though not by much. This at first may seem like an improvement, but it's also not, because the flow of the game is to solve puzzles, not spend huge amounts of time discussing a lot of pointless and varied topics and that flow is being disrupted quite constantly in Talos 2. Instead of a Bethesda-like dialogue cutscene, I would've just opted for dialogue to be entirely done inside your head just like most of the banter in the game. It's a nitpick I suppose, but this is after all a very long puzzle game, maybe too long, and at one point the dialogue just seemed to drag on without adding anything much to the overall moral story.

Story rating: 8/10

The main aspect of Talos 2 is obviously the gameplay, a massive world filled with maybe a bit too many puzzles than I would've hoped. If you played the first, you know exactly what to expect, but also not quite. The first game had a few puzzle mechanics and tools regarding lasers, however, the difficulty ranged from medium to sometimes incredibly hard.

In Talos 2 they decided to go a different route, perhaps in hopes of attracting more players to its fanbase. Now there are a lot more puzzles, but they introduce a lot of new tools and mechanics with each area you explore, keeping the gameplay fresh for almost all of its entirety. The downside of introducing new mechanics in every new area means they had to lower the difficulty of solving these puzzles. A lot of these puzzle rooms are absolutely banal and to make matters worse they've added ways to skip said puzzle rooms by collecting flames scattered around the huge empty maps, and let me tell you there are quite a lot of them.

The only challenge I had was with the Golden Door puzzles however even there most of the cool tools you are introduced in the main game are not as creatively used as I would've hoped, instead the challenge in the Golden Door is some absurd thing such as blocking the lasers with your body which was a very hated unknown mechanic from the first game.

The stars are not mandatory to get any kind of endings and collecting them, with one or two exceptions is incredibly easy. Collecting all the stars will only give you a cool cinematic and that's about it. Quite dissapointing.

The main problem I and seemingly most of the people I've seen playing the game had, are the maps themselves. Going from one puzzle room to another or collecting stars is extremely tedious as all the maps are way too large for their own good. Backtracking is a pain due to that.

Overall Talos 2 goes in a different direction with its main puzzles compared to the first while retaining the core which we all love.

Gameplay rating: 8.5/10

Audio design has been improved vastly compared to the first, mostly budget-wise. There are a ton of dialogues in the game, maybe a bit too much, however, everyone does a good job at voicing their characters.

The soundtrack is just as amazing as the first, maybe even better, as there are more areas and therefore more songs being played in your ear. It's very relaxing overall and fits quite well with the whole aspect of the game. As for the sound effects, they're all pretty standard stuff, nothing out of the ordinary.

Audio rating: 8.5/10

Sadly or luckily depending on your point of view they ditched the Sam engine and decided to go with Unreal Engine 5. Sadly, UE5 as it stands is still very much "fresh" and has a ton of issues which you'll notice in a lot of games using the same engine, mostly optimization issues. To counter that The Talos 2 devs cut some corners with the visuals, such as reducing lighting quality, no dynamic clouds, etc. The game runs fairly decent, but then again, I do have a high-end GPU and I still had to use frame-gen and DLSS to have a decent framerate so I imagine most users will have to use medium settings to run the game ok as certain settings such as GI above high automatically enable ray-tracing effects.

That being said, the game does look pretty most of the time, it has some incredible vistas and some insane architectural designs around and inside the maps. Level design as I talked about it a bit in the gameplay aspect is not quite as good, the levels are far too large, and that in turn may also impact the performance negatively. As for bugs and whatnot, there were quite a few of them, but the devs were quick to smash them, so all is good on that front.

Graphics, performance and tech analysis score: 7.5/10

While most sequels are better or worse than their predecessors, The Talos Principle 2 is different, not worse nor better. It does certain things better and certain things worse, but the overall quality of the product does not suffer, and the game is well worth getting. Also, the price of the game is INSANELY good, so do yourself a favor and buy it.

[i][url=https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/35145066/] My review page.[/url][/i] [i][url=https://www.twitch.tv/nightserg] Follow me on twitch![/url][/i] [h1]The gist of it:[/h1] I was extremely surprised when The Talos Principle 2 was announced, because I thought it did not sell too well to warrant a sequel, being a niche game, but here we are almost 40 hours after doing 100% in the game and it's safe to say I am super glad they decided to make a new one. The Talos Principle 2 is a fantastic sequel to an already fantastic puzzle game and while it's not perfect, which I'll detail below, I still want more. 👍 [u]The good parts:[/u] +Excellent puzzle designs that range from easy to hard difficulty. +Amazing soundtrack. +Stunning vistas and architectural design 👎[u]The bad parts:[/u] -The maps are too large and tedious to go from one puzzle to another. -Dialogue system [h1]Story[/h1] The Talos Principle is a direct sequel to the second game so I would highly recommend you play the first as well, but it's not that mandatory as there are short recaps in the game. You wake up as the number 1000 android created by what the first android, the character you played in the first game, set out to do following the paths of Alexandra. Shortly after you wake up things start to go weird and you're off to explore a new and mysterious island filled with tons of puzzles created for an unknown reason. I obviously can't talk much without spoiling, but the gist is, that the story holds the same moral choices the first game gave you, about what it means to be human and their decisions. It's a pretty decent story, it will certainly make you rethink certain aspects of your own life, very philosophical stuff. What's different from the first is that now you seem to have certain dialogue choices that can impact the multiple endings the game has, though not by much. This at first may seem like an improvement, but it's also not, because the flow of the game is to solve puzzles, not spend huge amounts of time discussing a lot of pointless and varied topics and that flow is being disrupted quite constantly in Talos 2. Instead of a Bethesda-like dialogue cutscene, I would've just opted for dialogue to be entirely done inside your head just like most of the banter in the game. It's a nitpick I suppose, but this is after all a very long puzzle game, maybe too long, and at one point the dialogue just seemed to drag on without adding anything much to the overall moral story. Story rating: 8/10 [h1]Gameplay[/h1] The main aspect of Talos 2 is obviously the gameplay, a massive world filled with maybe a bit too many puzzles than I would've hoped. If you played the first, you know exactly what to expect, but also not quite. The first game had a few puzzle mechanics and tools regarding lasers, however, the difficulty ranged from medium to sometimes incredibly hard. In Talos 2 they decided to go a different route, perhaps in hopes of attracting more players to its fanbase. Now there are a lot more puzzles, but they introduce a lot of new tools and mechanics with each area you explore, keeping the gameplay fresh for almost all of its entirety. The downside of introducing new mechanics in every new area means they had to lower the difficulty of solving these puzzles. A lot of these puzzle rooms are absolutely banal and to make matters worse they've added ways to skip said puzzle rooms by collecting flames scattered around the huge empty maps, and let me tell you there are quite a lot of them. The only challenge I had was with the Golden Door puzzles however even there most of the cool tools you are introduced in the main game are not as creatively used as I would've hoped, instead the challenge in the Golden Door is some absurd thing such as blocking the lasers with your body which was a very hated unknown mechanic from the first game. The stars are not mandatory to get any kind of endings and collecting them, with one or two exceptions is incredibly easy. Collecting all the stars will only give you a cool cinematic and that's about it. Quite dissapointing. The main problem I and seemingly most of the people I've seen playing the game had, are the maps themselves. Going from one puzzle room to another or collecting stars is extremely tedious as all the maps are way too large for their own good. Backtracking is a pain due to that. Overall Talos 2 goes in a different direction with its main puzzles compared to the first while retaining the core which we all love. Gameplay rating: 8.5/10 [h1]Audio[/h1] Audio design has been improved vastly compared to the first, mostly budget-wise. There are a ton of dialogues in the game, maybe a bit too much, however, everyone does a good job at voicing their characters. The soundtrack is just as amazing as the first, maybe even better, as there are more areas and therefore more songs being played in your ear. It's very relaxing overall and fits quite well with the whole aspect of the game. As for the sound effects, they're all pretty standard stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. Audio rating: 8.5/10 [h1]Graphics, performance and tech analysis[/h1] Sadly or luckily depending on your point of view they ditched the Sam engine and decided to go with Unreal Engine 5. Sadly, UE5 as it stands is still very much "fresh" and has a ton of issues which you'll notice in a lot of games using the same engine, mostly optimization issues. To counter that The Talos 2 devs cut some corners with the visuals, such as reducing lighting quality, no dynamic clouds, etc. The game runs fairly decent, but then again, I do have a high-end GPU and I still had to use frame-gen and DLSS to have a decent framerate so I imagine most users will have to use medium settings to run the game ok as certain settings such as GI above high automatically enable ray-tracing effects. That being said, the game does look pretty most of the time, it has some incredible vistas and some insane architectural designs around and inside the maps. Level design as I talked about it a bit in the gameplay aspect is not quite as good, the levels are far too large, and that in turn may also impact the performance negatively. As for bugs and whatnot, there were quite a few of them, but the devs were quick to smash them, so all is good on that front. Graphics, performance and tech analysis score: 7.5/10 [h1]Conclusion[/h1] While most sequels are better or worse than their predecessors, The Talos Principle 2 is different, not worse nor better. It does certain things better and certain things worse, but the overall quality of the product does not suffer, and the game is well worth getting. Also, the price of the game is INSANELY good, so do yourself a favor and buy it. [h1]Final score: 8.1/10[/h1]