I'll start off by admitting that I am not a fan of point-and-click adventure games. I've always found them somewhat tedious and almost always got stuck somewhere fairly quickly and have up. That is why I was especially thrilled when I discovered Still Life - a point-and-click adventure game that was actually good and made me want to uninstall it in frustration only once. 
The biggest drawback of it was the nonexistant closure. Which was one of the reasons why I waited so long for Still Life 2. Now that I've got to play it through, I just have to vent somewhere (lucky you) - you are warned beforehand that this will be a negative review, however, I think my reasons should justify that.
Oh, and yes, I will be comparing Still Life 2 to Still Life. If a company makes a second game in a franchise, advertises it as a sequel, uses the same main character and integrates the end of the first game into the second (yes, you don't actually finish Still Life until the end of Still Life 2), then for anyone to be indignant about the fact that the second game is measured by the standards of the first one... That's like shooting someone in the face and then being indignant at being arrested for no reason another than that the victim is not feeling well.
First of all, visuals. Still Life was gorgeous (to me the killer's referring to one of his victims as "gorgeous" in SL2 was, in fact, ironic in this regard). Shining 2D backgrounds that might or might not have been pre-rendered 3D graphics with or without image post-processing blended seamlessly with actual, real-time 3D graphics where it was necessary, and ONLY where it was necessary. Simply put, stuff that had to move in real time was done in 3D, everything stationary was in beautiful 2D. And it worked perfectly - not only visually, but performance-wise as well. 2D background takes pretty much no power at all, as all computer has to do is to display one image, which can be as intricate and detailed as possible given the available dimensions. 3D graphics, on the other hand, are, in essence, a bunch of tiny polygons with colored pixels on them. It takes immense computer resources pouring into lighting, shaders, shadows, anti-aliasing, texture filtering and whatnot to get anywhere close the beauty that can easily be achieved with a 2D picture that even a cell-phone can display with no trouble.
In Still Life 2, for some reason, someone decided that everything should be done in 3D. Probably in part because someone also decided, that, even though the game still has the pre-set camera angles in a screen-by-screen gameplay common to most adventure games, the camera should also move about, just a little bit. I won't go into detail about how much it annoyed me right from the start, as I can see that it could be a thing of preference. What is not a matter of preference, however, is the fact that as soon as you introduce moving "side-show" camera (one that is located in different places for different screens) in a game, any and all 2D backgrounds go out the window. The result is predictable - the game would look OK by itself, but, standing next to the original, the graphics look simple, drab and just plain ugly.
Story. Not much to say here, since things like that are subjective, but I would like to say one thing. "The story is only as good as the villain." I might even go as far as to say that the villain defines the story, at least in the detective-drama genre. So let's compare the villains. Still Life - the murderer is stylishly dressed, moving silently and swiftly, clothed in a black suit with a bellowing cape and a top hat, wearing a shining mask with engravings and using a beautiful curved knife with ivory handle (basically they ripped off the Alchemist from the movie Vidocq). Kills his victims almost instantly. Still Life 2 - the murderer is a methodical brute, moving about slowly, deliberately and loudly. Wearing heavy black boots under a heavy black coat, and a gas mask. Makes his victims solve puzzles before torturing them and finally shooting them in the head (ripping off Jigsaw from the Saw movies). I prefer the first.
Gameplay stuff now.
Main thing - difficulty balance. Yahtzee hit the nail on the head (as usual), when he said that point-and-click adventure games died a natural and deserved death, because 90% of them were basically tedious click-fests where most of the time you didn't spend randomly clicking on everything you could find on the screen, you instead spent rubbing everything you had in your inventory on everything that you could find on the screen. This was because there were rarely enough hints to point you in the right direction. This is where balancing comes in. You can't make all the puzzles obvious and lead the players by the hand all the time, since then instead of a game you just have a "click to continue" video presentation. On the other hand, not giving enough hints and coming up with puzzles with the sole purpose of throwing the player will make the game into a frustrating, boring click-fest.
Still Life had it pretty much perfect. Not that there weren't some hard spots (especially the notorious cooking puzzle the first time through), but overall it avoided being overly simple to the point of the game playing itself, but still managed to be accessible enough to keep the pacing and story going mostly smoothly, as well as keeping the playing itself interesting. Still Life 2 - not so much. Evidence, gathering, for example, keeps being spoon-fed to you all the way through (there's a special cursor for when you can use your forensic kit, accompanied by an explanatory/hinting text every time you click on the possible evidence), while detailed item descriptions have been removed completely and lots of puzzles make all kinds of assumptions about what should be obvious to the player, in addition to lots of "active spots" being only a few pixels wide and close to other such spots so they can be easily missed. Whenever I got stuck, 8 times out of 10 it turned out to be not because I couldn't figure out the solution, but because I had missed some spot while examining stuff.
Timed puzzles and dying. Oh God, the timed death-puzzles. Introducing a death element in a point-and-click adventure game might not be a bad thing itself, if executed properly, but situations where you have to figure out what to do quickly or die? No, no, no, no. No. In SL2 there is this exact situation: you start from scratch in a room (no inventory), and are given a limited amount of time before you die. Your "puzzle"? Find a way to prevent yourself from dying. Now, the only reason I can think of why such a thing would be put in this type of game is to create tension. However, it doesn't. Unlike timing puzzles in action oriented games, where you can make a fatal mistake at any point no matter how many times you try, a mind puzzle only has to be solved once to lose it's "tension" forever. And the knowledge of this, coupled with the ability to just load the game & try again instantly turns any potential tension into tedium.
Locations. In the original, you had two parallel storylines, and each was set in a city with around 6-8 distinct locations to discover and explore, including going back and forth between them. Still Life 2 has 3 parallel storylines, two of which come together about midway through, and for all those there are only 5 locations in total, with 70% of the game spent in one of them. The transitions between the areas are entirely linear and story-controlled, you can never leave the place in any way other than by progressing in the storyline. Admittedly, the main location is much more expansive than any in the previous game and is explored by different people at different times and in different conditions, but it's still the same place. It makes the game feel small and cramped, whereas Still Life felt even open-ended to some extent.
Not knowing what to do, or even when you're done. In Still Life, you always had a specific task to do in order to progress in the story line. If the task was of the sort that did not have a clearly visible end point (like gathering "all the evidence you can find"), you usually had someone to talk to as a way to check if you're done or not. In SL2, there's also an evidence gathering task, however, there is no way to check if you're done or not. You ask someone to call you back with information, and, while it supposedly should only take time, in reality the call is returned (and the story can progress) only when you have gathered every piece of evidence in the entire location (which is several times bigger than any location in Still Life). But, unless you know this beforehand, there is absolutely no way for you to know why you're stuck or even that you are - when you have two events that advance the story and both of them are presented as only needing time to pass, it can take a while to figure out that actually everyone's "waiting" on you.
Inventory management. Another giant mistake, IMO. I don't remember ever seeing a single point-and-click adventure game where you had limited inventory space and had to run to and fro containers to exchange items. Not to mention that the game tells you how many spaces the item will take up (you have to rearrange your inventory manually to make space if needed), without telling the direction and layout of those spaces - if an item takes up 4 spaces, should you rearrange for the free space to be vertical, horizontal or box-like?
I could keep going on about specific details, but this has been too long already. Basically - Still Life 2 sucks because at it's core it is no more than the average point-and-click "rub-fest" following in the footsteps of the relatively brilliant Still Life. Rent it if you want to get closure on Still Life (though I was disappointed, I think you will be too), but otherwise I'd stay clear of this one unless you're really a fan of point-and-click adventure games.
The biggest drawback of it was the nonexistant closure. Which was one of the reasons why I waited so long for Still Life 2. Now that I've got to play it through, I just have to vent somewhere (lucky you) - you are warned beforehand that this will be a negative review, however, I think my reasons should justify that.Oh, and yes, I will be comparing Still Life 2 to Still Life. If a company makes a second game in a franchise, advertises it as a sequel, uses the same main character and integrates the end of the first game into the second (yes, you don't actually finish Still Life until the end of Still Life 2), then for anyone to be indignant about the fact that the second game is measured by the standards of the first one... That's like shooting someone in the face and then being indignant at being arrested for no reason another than that the victim is not feeling well.
First of all, visuals. Still Life was gorgeous (to me the killer's referring to one of his victims as "gorgeous" in SL2 was, in fact, ironic in this regard). Shining 2D backgrounds that might or might not have been pre-rendered 3D graphics with or without image post-processing blended seamlessly with actual, real-time 3D graphics where it was necessary, and ONLY where it was necessary. Simply put, stuff that had to move in real time was done in 3D, everything stationary was in beautiful 2D. And it worked perfectly - not only visually, but performance-wise as well. 2D background takes pretty much no power at all, as all computer has to do is to display one image, which can be as intricate and detailed as possible given the available dimensions. 3D graphics, on the other hand, are, in essence, a bunch of tiny polygons with colored pixels on them. It takes immense computer resources pouring into lighting, shaders, shadows, anti-aliasing, texture filtering and whatnot to get anywhere close the beauty that can easily be achieved with a 2D picture that even a cell-phone can display with no trouble.
In Still Life 2, for some reason, someone decided that everything should be done in 3D. Probably in part because someone also decided, that, even though the game still has the pre-set camera angles in a screen-by-screen gameplay common to most adventure games, the camera should also move about, just a little bit. I won't go into detail about how much it annoyed me right from the start, as I can see that it could be a thing of preference. What is not a matter of preference, however, is the fact that as soon as you introduce moving "side-show" camera (one that is located in different places for different screens) in a game, any and all 2D backgrounds go out the window. The result is predictable - the game would look OK by itself, but, standing next to the original, the graphics look simple, drab and just plain ugly.
Story. Not much to say here, since things like that are subjective, but I would like to say one thing. "The story is only as good as the villain." I might even go as far as to say that the villain defines the story, at least in the detective-drama genre. So let's compare the villains. Still Life - the murderer is stylishly dressed, moving silently and swiftly, clothed in a black suit with a bellowing cape and a top hat, wearing a shining mask with engravings and using a beautiful curved knife with ivory handle (basically they ripped off the Alchemist from the movie Vidocq). Kills his victims almost instantly. Still Life 2 - the murderer is a methodical brute, moving about slowly, deliberately and loudly. Wearing heavy black boots under a heavy black coat, and a gas mask. Makes his victims solve puzzles before torturing them and finally shooting them in the head (ripping off Jigsaw from the Saw movies). I prefer the first.
Gameplay stuff now.
Main thing - difficulty balance. Yahtzee hit the nail on the head (as usual), when he said that point-and-click adventure games died a natural and deserved death, because 90% of them were basically tedious click-fests where most of the time you didn't spend randomly clicking on everything you could find on the screen, you instead spent rubbing everything you had in your inventory on everything that you could find on the screen. This was because there were rarely enough hints to point you in the right direction. This is where balancing comes in. You can't make all the puzzles obvious and lead the players by the hand all the time, since then instead of a game you just have a "click to continue" video presentation. On the other hand, not giving enough hints and coming up with puzzles with the sole purpose of throwing the player will make the game into a frustrating, boring click-fest.
Still Life had it pretty much perfect. Not that there weren't some hard spots (especially the notorious cooking puzzle the first time through), but overall it avoided being overly simple to the point of the game playing itself, but still managed to be accessible enough to keep the pacing and story going mostly smoothly, as well as keeping the playing itself interesting. Still Life 2 - not so much. Evidence, gathering, for example, keeps being spoon-fed to you all the way through (there's a special cursor for when you can use your forensic kit, accompanied by an explanatory/hinting text every time you click on the possible evidence), while detailed item descriptions have been removed completely and lots of puzzles make all kinds of assumptions about what should be obvious to the player, in addition to lots of "active spots" being only a few pixels wide and close to other such spots so they can be easily missed. Whenever I got stuck, 8 times out of 10 it turned out to be not because I couldn't figure out the solution, but because I had missed some spot while examining stuff.
Timed puzzles and dying. Oh God, the timed death-puzzles. Introducing a death element in a point-and-click adventure game might not be a bad thing itself, if executed properly, but situations where you have to figure out what to do quickly or die? No, no, no, no. No. In SL2 there is this exact situation: you start from scratch in a room (no inventory), and are given a limited amount of time before you die. Your "puzzle"? Find a way to prevent yourself from dying. Now, the only reason I can think of why such a thing would be put in this type of game is to create tension. However, it doesn't. Unlike timing puzzles in action oriented games, where you can make a fatal mistake at any point no matter how many times you try, a mind puzzle only has to be solved once to lose it's "tension" forever. And the knowledge of this, coupled with the ability to just load the game & try again instantly turns any potential tension into tedium.
Locations. In the original, you had two parallel storylines, and each was set in a city with around 6-8 distinct locations to discover and explore, including going back and forth between them. Still Life 2 has 3 parallel storylines, two of which come together about midway through, and for all those there are only 5 locations in total, with 70% of the game spent in one of them. The transitions between the areas are entirely linear and story-controlled, you can never leave the place in any way other than by progressing in the storyline. Admittedly, the main location is much more expansive than any in the previous game and is explored by different people at different times and in different conditions, but it's still the same place. It makes the game feel small and cramped, whereas Still Life felt even open-ended to some extent.
Not knowing what to do, or even when you're done. In Still Life, you always had a specific task to do in order to progress in the story line. If the task was of the sort that did not have a clearly visible end point (like gathering "all the evidence you can find"), you usually had someone to talk to as a way to check if you're done or not. In SL2, there's also an evidence gathering task, however, there is no way to check if you're done or not. You ask someone to call you back with information, and, while it supposedly should only take time, in reality the call is returned (and the story can progress) only when you have gathered every piece of evidence in the entire location (which is several times bigger than any location in Still Life). But, unless you know this beforehand, there is absolutely no way for you to know why you're stuck or even that you are - when you have two events that advance the story and both of them are presented as only needing time to pass, it can take a while to figure out that actually everyone's "waiting" on you.
Inventory management. Another giant mistake, IMO. I don't remember ever seeing a single point-and-click adventure game where you had limited inventory space and had to run to and fro containers to exchange items. Not to mention that the game tells you how many spaces the item will take up (you have to rearrange your inventory manually to make space if needed), without telling the direction and layout of those spaces - if an item takes up 4 spaces, should you rearrange for the free space to be vertical, horizontal or box-like?
I could keep going on about specific details, but this has been too long already. Basically - Still Life 2 sucks because at it's core it is no more than the average point-and-click "rub-fest" following in the footsteps of the relatively brilliant Still Life. Rent it if you want to get closure on Still Life (though I was disappointed, I think you will be too), but otherwise I'd stay clear of this one unless you're really a fan of point-and-click adventure games.
