This was the second time in the recent years when I've spent several weeks playing a single game practically all my spare time and absolutely loved every single minute of it. Loved the puzzles, although most of them were too easy for me after playing Grimrock 1 and knowing what to expect. Loved the text riddles (which are much more challenging than the puzzles). Loved the huge world (the game was much bigger than I expected). Loved the freedom to go wherever I please, instead of linear advancing through a single multi-level dungeon. Absolutely loved the amount of backtracking - don't let anyone tell you that's a bad thing, because there's not nearly enough of it in today's games. As for going through my inventory during a hot battle to find the necessary potions (even 2 sets of hands are not nearly enough for this) - maybe I didn't love it that much, but hey - hardcore games are hard. I'm ok with that.
Perhaps the only things I hated in LOG2 were the big loading times... and the magic spell selection. The latter sucks. Still sucks. How can you not see that an Earth Magic school consisting of only 3 mostly useless poison spells sucks? When you have 1 (one!) mage in your party with a choice of 5 (five!) magic skills to develop, and you can only reasonably hope to maximize 3 of them, and you happen to choose Earth as one of your main priorities (just because you hope that the developers were sane enough to balance all the different schools at least as good as they did it with the weapon skills), then you've just totally screwed up one of your party members.
Well, I was lucky. At least I chose fire as my first priority, and had enough spare points to put into air once I found out I need it as well. Still, I wish I haven't wasted time on Earth magic and developed water instead. And it still wouldn't change the fact that you need fire 5 + air 3 for the ultimate combat spell, and there are no other options nearly as good. So I really hope Grimrock 3 will finally have a much bigger and more balanced selection of spells in all of the magic schools.
Ah, by the way... when's Grimrock 3 coming out? I can't wait already.
Once again. Thank you Almost Human!
P.S. About that "second time" I mentioned above. The first was
SpoilerShow
The Legend of Grimrock 1