Spirit of the North 2

Version: 1.000.000 at 22,76 GB on disc.

Number of players: 1
Languages: German, French, Spanish, Japanese, English, Russian, Chinese (simplified), Korean, Italian
Accessibility options: n/a
Quality/Performance option: Yes

Played in Fidelity mode
Main story aborted at about 50 % completion.
Numerous side activities tested and collectibles found along the way.



Overall verdict:
All the bugs combined with the general design of the game (vast empty landscapes and rare save points), the experience is too tedious to give this a positive rating.


Test Notes:
Observable texture pop-in, yet not too distracting.
Occasional frame drops
Occasional flickering of sunlight reflections at the edge of the screen.
Encountered one instance where ground textures/shaders weren’t loaded properly and the soil consisted of a visible grid of squares with low res textures.
Hints usually appear only after you have encountered certain interactable objects and spaces. Could be intentional.
In tight spaces, the camera tends to twitch a little, since it can’t find a proper place to adjust to.
During the cutscene at the end of the prologue, the image briefly flickered as if it wanted to fade to black.
Encountered instances in which ground foliage took several seconds to load after unpausing the game.
In the room before fighting the stag boss, music sounded distorted. Played normally after restarting the game.
Encountered several caves with huge walls of missing textures. Only a grey grid was present where rocks were meant to be rendered.
When fighting the stag, during one try, it would always spawn spikes directly underneath us after returning from one of the pillars you need to light up. There was no way to avoid this and we died to it before the third phase of the battle.
Occasionally, the pressing the jump button wouldn’t register.
In some instances, certain parts of the terrain would seemingly change their grip. In one instance, you can be able to climb very steep rocks. Trying again a few seconds later would result in slipping and falling, despite taking the exact same jumps.
Lighting is buggy. Inside caves no matter how you tilt the camera the screen can turn completely black except for the glowing parts of your body. Had to adjust brightness to the maximum to have a guess where the actual path was in countless instances
On top, the game has multiple places where you can softlock yourself or where you can get stuck. In one such instance, while looking for an exit of a cave, we ultimately fell through the map and could only reload.

Review copy provided by Silver Lining.