Gedonia 2 Review Summary

Engaging Co-op & Fun Gameplay: Players consistently report a highly enjoyable experience, with many highlighting the cooperative multiplayer mode as a significant source of fun and engagement. The core gameplay loop is praised for exceeding expectations and providing a great time, often leading to extended play sessions.

Strong Early Access Potential: Despite being in early access, the game is seen as robust and full of potential, offering substantial content and mechanics already. The developer's responsiveness to feedback, frequent updates, and clear passion are highly appreciated, instilling confidence in the game's future development.

Significant Sequel Improvements: The game is lauded as a substantial upgrade from its predecessor, Gedonia 1, with improvements across graphics, combat, voice acting, and world design. It successfully builds upon the beloved foundation of the first game, enhancing core features while retaining its unique charm.

Flexible Combat & Deep Skills: The combat system is diverse and satisfying, supporting various playstyles from melee to magic and summoning. Players highly praise the extensive, classless skill trees that offer immense freedom for character building and unique, synergistic builds, promoting replayability.

Evokes Old-School Charm & Soul: The game offers a strong sense of nostalgia, reminiscent of classic RPGs from the early 2000s, like WoW and Fable. Players appreciate its unique atmosphere, heartfelt design, and 'soulful' quality, contrasting it with more modern, generic titles.

Game Lacks Technical Polish: The game is widely reported as fundamentally unfinished and unpolished, plagued by numerous bugs, frequent crashes, freezes, and significant FPS drops even on capable hardware. Many players feel it resembles an alpha build rather than a ready Early Access title, making the experience frustrating.

Poor Controls & User Interface: Players report "disgusting" and "crooked" controls with poor reaction times, negatively impacting character manipulation. The user interface is also criticized for being clunky, inconvenient, and cheap-looking, further detracting from the overall player experience. Controller support is particularly highlighted as problematic.

Clunky Combat & Animations: Combat is consistently described as clunky, slow, and lacking impact, largely due to hard animation locks that prevent crucial actions like dodging or canceling attacks. Character movement and attack animations are frequently criticized for being stiff, wooden, or poorly blended, making the overall combat experience unenjoyable, especially in melee.

Inferior to Gedonia 1: Many players who enjoyed the predecessor express significant disappointment, perceiving Gedonia 2 as a regression from the first game. Criticisms span across combat, animations, UI, skill systems, and overall content, with the game feeling less polished, less deep, and offering little new despite a higher price point.

Broken Quest System: The quest system is a major source of frustration due to frequent bugs, including quests not tracking properly, disappearing, lacking clear descriptions or markers, and becoming uncompletable. This dysfunction often leads to wasted time, confusion, and a significant hindrance to player progression.

Flexible Classless RPG: Players appreciate the game's open-world, sandbox RPG design with a classless progression system based on stat allocation. This allows significant freedom for character building and experimentation, though initial choices are critical and permanent. It combines elements of games like WoW and Dishonored, offering varied build possibilities.

Dynamic Combat System: Combat blends tab-target principles with action-oriented mechanics, emphasizing dodging and strategic ability use. While functional for exploration, some feedback noted constrained character movement during combat and suggested improvements for fluidity.

Robust Crafting System: The game features a comprehensive crafting system with multiple professions like blacksmithing, tailoring, alchemy, and cooking. Crafting success and available options are influenced by character intelligence and the gathering of specific materials.

Helpful Quality-of-Life Features: Players appreciate useful features like an "Unstuck" button to resolve geometry issues, an automatic save system upon exit, and a teleportation network. The ability to start New Game+ while retaining progress is also mentioned.

Limited Early Access Content: As an Early Access title, the game currently provides approximately 10-15 hours of content with a level cap around 20. This limited scope is generally understood and expected given its ongoing development stage.

Significant Performance & Optimization Issues: A large number of players, including those with high-end systems, report severe performance problems such as frequent FPS drops, constant stuttering, and high resource consumption. These issues are particularly noticeable in cities, during combat, and for users with HDDs.

Varying Performance Experiences: While many players face performance challenges, some report stable FPS and no issues, even on specific hardware configurations like the Radeon 6600xt or in open world areas. This indicates an inconsistency in performance across different user setups.

Minor Visual Glitches: Some minor visual bugs have been observed, such as rain appearing inside buildings and occasional texture glitches, likely related to lighting. However, players generally report not encountering any game-breaking bugs.

Loading Time & Technical Quirks: Players note long loading times, potentially due to the game running on a local host even in solo mode. There was also a report of an incorrect character loading after a world map issue.

Steam Deck Performance Moderate: On Steam Deck, performance is described as 'more or less normal' with around 30 FPS. However, the lack of FSR support is noted as a limiting factor preventing higher frame rates on this platform.

Strong Recommendation for RPG Fans: Many players highly recommend the game, praising its potential, atmosphere, and appeal to RPG enthusiasts, especially those who enjoyed the first installment. Some advise buying it at full price to support the developer's ongoing efforts.

Best for Niche RPG & Co-op Fans: The game is particularly recommended for players who enjoy classic CRPGs, open-world action RPGs, or those seeking a co-op experience reminiscent of WoW/Fable. These players are often willing to tolerate early access imperfections.

Appeals to Gedonia 1 Fans: Players who enjoyed the original Gedonia are likely to appreciate this sequel. Some suggest playing the first game to understand the series' potential or for a more complete experience, though the naming 'Gedonia 2' also drew specific commentary.

Promising Early Access, Awaits Polish: Players widely acknowledge the game is in an early alpha/beta state, expecting numerous bugs and unfinished content. Despite this, there's immense hope and anticipation for future updates, content additions, and polish, with many committing to revisit the game after significant development.

Strong Developer Support & Gedonia 1 Legacy: Many players are purchasing the game specifically to support the developer, Oleg Kazakov, and his small team, often citing their appreciation for the first Gedonia game. There's a strong sentiment that Gedonia 2 carries forward the original's philosophy, with expectations that its development journey will mirror the first game's eventual success.

Requests for Specific Features & Content: Players have expressed desires for concrete additions, including enhanced character customization with stat distribution, more diverse spell types (like necromancy), new biomes, playable races, improved base building, and interesting mounts. This indicates a community eager to see certain mechanics expanded upon.