In my humble opinion, one of the best strategic rpg ever made.
Let's start with the bad.
Technically, it's a bit worse than blackguard 1. It's more prone to bugs (Great Petrifier fight is the biggest culprit, until patched, but there are other, like the things that happen if you kill ALL the enemies before the supposed enemy reinforcement arrives - causing you to wing the game, while there are still enemies spawned) and to translation errors (in italian, 'chest' mean both chestpiece ("Torace") and chest container ("Forziere"); as such, in blackguard 2, all characters wear chest containers on their chests. Because they're fucking badass).
It's also more artificially difficult than the first one. Some fights are absolutely atrocious unless you know what's coming, like the Adamant fight, where you're supposed to run in 6 different places of the arena while a sand golem pelts you with sand, swallows your party members, or knocks them down, and a wizard cast multiple crowd control spells, or the 30 quartz pieces fight, where you have to fight against regenerating and respawning lizards while breaking crystals.
The last 'bad' thing is the ending. Don't misunderstand me, it's not THAT bad. For example, it's not blackguard 1 bad. Mainly, the things that lacks are the ending slides. There could have been some slides, especially for various characters.
Now, for the neutral.
The combat system has been overhauled. It's better on one side since you can't spam anymore triple shot and kill everything. On the other hand, now the frost spell lvl 4, when applied four-five times in a row - which isn't exactly hard since spells now can't fail, and you may have up to two mages - clears 90% of the game fights.
And the good.
The characters are excellent! Zuraban and Faramund in particular, but the other too. We can even peer in the motives that pushes every single of the gladiators - for example, why is Naurim obsessed with fire, or why Zuraban is such a womanizer. And i'm not talking just about the main npc; the other guys that you encounter are very fleshed out, from the barely sane insect-breeder to the arrogant golem creator to the antagonist. They're even beliveable, which isn't very easy, since the majority of them is a bunch of insane psychopaths. And Cassia. I have no words for how good Cassia sounds. How... insane, and at the same time focused, unsure, and so on.
The fights. While i said before that some fights are incredibly difficult, they're also incredibly rewarding when you finally get them down. Adamant fight, for example. Or the Great Petrifier fight.
The atmosphere. It's like it's a mix between games of thrones - with Cassia as a Daenerys expy - and early Berserk volumes. It's very good, very grim (even tho sometimes it's unnecessarily so, and gets a bit derpy). It's what i always wanted from such an rpg. I mean, who cares about saving the world and then dying because you have to self sacrifice to stop the great demon of shit-puking. If i had to die, i would go in a blaze, on the top of a mountain of corpses, while king of the world.
tl;dr:
Some bugs, difficult fights, changed what was op, good characters, good fights, good atmosphere. Imho, one of the best srpg.
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