GRIME II

“Dialogue is frequent, intrusive, and rarely meaningful to either the gameplay or story.”

“Another con within the story is how slow the pacing feels for the first 2 items of the weapon quest, traversing these labyrinthian maze-like areas with nothing happening until we can finally access paint reef was a slog personally, especially considering the pacing felt quite good for everything up until and after the weapon quest.”

“Ultimately I honestly found it pretty unsatisfying given all the gameplay foibles, fussy mechanics and bosses that turn into QTEs more than build/combat style, and the story falling flat pretty hard for me with too many illusory choices and options that aren't options combined with a not very well thought out narrative.”

“I also started running into more bugs farther in - insta-kill spikes that didn't load, chunks of a wall missing (that made it look like it had a dash-into-the-hole secret), the music in one of the later areas just stopped playing and left it dead silent, one of the cutscenes would start fully illuminated then black out and fade back in.”

“Some of these bosses took me 1-2 hours, usually requiring me to turn off the music and ambience, focusing on sound effects and the cues they brought.”

“These are things like mantling not properly working on certain corners, missing descriptions or typos and music ceasing to play.”

“While the game retains the novel aesthetic of the first, it hasn't been nearly refined enough, such that often something that should look uncanny often just looks like an unbaked asset got dropped into the world.”

“Grime II runs pretty well on my Lenovo Legion S handheld—but only after I significantly reduced the graphics quality.”

“With high texture and shadow quality, the device struggles and the graphics stutter.”

“Just like the first Grime on release, this game is also buggy as hell right now. I encountered a bug where a story boss's HP bar just disappeared and the boss straight up died without me doing anything when I entered the arena; another story boss's second phase's HP bar wasn't there the whole time, so I didn't even know if I was damaging it before I died. The bosses themselves aren't really challenging enough; you die to bugs or unresponsive controls more than your own skill issues. One boss basically plays out like a cinema experience where you just watch and occasionally react.”

“There are pretty obvious optimization issues in the late game sections: frame dropping, stuttering, and graphic glitches become constant, even though there's little to none in early to mid-game. Controls become clunky during long platforming sections, forcing you to restart because your character refuses to grapple, slide, or jump properly. Enemies (non-bosses) become damage sponges, many with weird or missing startup animations, making attacks unpredictable the first time. There's no recovery invincibility frames, so taking damage often leads to follow-up damage and death, as the game doesn't allow you to react to mistakes unlike Hollow Knight or Silksong. These problems make the game unnecessarily frustrating rather than genuinely difficult.”

“Holy hell, this game is buggy as hell... everything was fine before the last sculptor boss, but once I reached that boss, pressing jump causes my character to stand still for at least a second before actually jumping. I tried different controllers and restarted my PC, but the issue persisted. After beating that boss, the platforming becomes insufferable: the grapple slide is so unresponsive that sometimes it works fine, but other times it doesn't grapple anything properly even when I'm right next to a grapple point. These buggy annoyances severely impact the experience and I can't recommend this game before it receives a massive patch or a definitive version.”

“Ultimately, Grime II delivers strong gameplay and memorable boss encounters, but its unfocused artistic direction and overly intrusive writing prevent it from matching the atmosphere and cohesion that made the original memorable.”

“For me, that clashes with the world and atmosphere and the experience as a whole.”

“Overall, I preferred the atmosphere of Grime 1 more, but this game's art design is still gorgeous.”

“Edit: forgot to mention that this game has some pretty obvious optimization issues in the late game sections with framedropping, stuttering, and graphic glitches becoming constant even though in the early to middle game there’s little to none; controls become clunky during long platforming sections, sometimes forcing restarts because the character refuses to grapple, slide, or jump; enemies (not bosses) become damage sponges with weird or missing startup animations, making it hard to react to attacks and often forcing players to guess or skip encounters; there are no recovery invincibility frames, so taking damage usually leads to death as the game doesn’t allow you to react to mistakes unlike Hollow Knight or Silksong.”

“Had some performance problems in select areas such as the main hub and a few other locations where even after lowering graphics settings, FPS would still drop to 20-30, while other areas maintained 40-50 FPS. This might be due to my computer specs, so better systems may experience fewer drops in these locations.”

“It gets progressively jankier as you discover new zones, with performance hitches exceeding those of the first game in frequency and severity.”

“There were genuinely moments that felt like the idea of 'fun' was sacrificed for 'how can we make this as obnoxious or tedious as possible.'”

“Literally every inch of the game has some incredibly tedious, frustrating, unfun aspect to it that just adds up the more you play.”

“Starting from middle game it starts getting tedious, and near the end it gets really over the top.”