Continuing the Diablo tradition of making sequels to mono-dungeon games semi-open-world, you are now roaming the whole island with distinct zones. On the one hand it has more variety, on the other it loses some of the focus. Also some of the required puzzles are so moon-logic cryptic, that you can be reaching for the walk-through.
New farmer class sounds like a fun idea, until you realize that there are no food sources and all your characters are starving. In the first game there were re-spawning blue lizards, with a lot of meat. Here you can only find a fish, once in a blue moon. And I’m not sure if they do re-spawn or if I’ve just missed those when I was fishing previous times. It still an interesting mechanic which adds variety, but it not as fun as Legend of Grimrock veterans would expect.
The story… The story is entirely unmemorable. And i don’t think it even ties to the story of the first game in any way. There is no mountain Grimrock either. You can find remains of the previous boss, but what does it mean? Does this game take place a million years after the first one and what was a mountain is just an island, and the rest of the kingdom and it’s continent is sunken?
Final fight is not puzzle-based, so you just kick an old guy around, until he drops, and hope that you’ve saved enough bombs for raw damage output.
Overall it’s still a fun game and is one of the best games of the year, but unlike with the first game, there are a lot of criticism to be voiced. And I didn’t have a craving to instantly replay it, especially on a higher difficulty.