A great review, as always yahtzee.
But why does it seem to me that there are always a handfull of posters who go into this comments section after seeing a review and type something along the lines of: "I agree with everything yahtzee said because I can't form opinions of my own and I haven't bothered to look at another piece of information regarding this game other than this mighty paragon of a brit so I guess the game is awful." I would say they're fanboys, but I'm expecting them all to read up to this point, stop reading and post a wave of "umad", "u stoopid blandy mcbland bland", etc
I apologize in advance for this huge wall of text which nobody will read.
NOW WATCH OUT FOR THEM SPOILERS WHICH I WON'T BOTHER HIGHLIGHTING
Anyway, I felt as though DS2 was an improvement of DS1 in nearly every way imaginable. There was a nice variation of environments from a hospital, a kindergarten, a preschool, a mall, apartment complexes, spooky cult churches, haunted houses, trash compactors, inner machinations of the station, blah blah blah. There were less orchestral explosions when monsters showed up, in fact I only remember a handful of times where the music started playing. The beginning was spectacular, which (LOLSPOILER I LIED)puts Isaac Clarke tied up in a straightjacket with no method of self defense other than to sprint for the exit whilst being pursued by the reanimated corpses of the cast of "One Flew over a Cuckoo's Nest". The best part about it was even after you escaped them through a door, the fact that the game had no qualms about making you sprint defenseless put me on edge...until it became obvious later that they didn't intend on doing it again. The design of the sprawl was also better than the ishimura because they made the apartments, hospitals, stores, etc look more like places you might have been to. I agree that like in DS1 eventually we get used to the scares nearer to the end, but there are enough cool set pieces and events throughout to keep you going, like (IF YOU DON?T LIKE SPOILERS, WHY WOULD YOU EVEN READ THIS) that slide down the train near the start and the elevator around the middle and that thing at the end which I won't spoil. Like somebody else said it?s more like a 65-35 mix of action and horror, but don't believe those people who say it's a bad game. It's actually quite good. Not nearly as scary as Amnesia, but it had quite a few good moments that made me very uneasy.
Also, the ripper is not nearly as strong as it was in DS1. Its range is reduced and it seems to do a fair bit less damage; in the first game you could hold them at arms length, but in this one, they get close enough to lovingly nibble your ear before biting it off. Double also, there weren't THAT many children. There seemed to be many more adult necromorphs than kids. Except in that one area that's like an auditorium from a grade/middle/highschool that freaked me out a bit because it looked suspiciously like the one that was at my grade school, minus the happy sun of course, we couldn't afford one. (TEEHEE SPOILER) I thought for sure yahtzee would have said something about that stage in the church where there was a big fat necro (a priest) who sends waves of little children at you. (BAD TOUCH)
(LOLSPOILER AGAIN)Triple also, I wonder why yahtzee never mentioned the new stalker enemy. And fuck those things. They're smart, they're organized and they peak around corners like dogs made of zombies. Everytime they showed up the game got way more tense because they tended to wait for you to make a move or for their attack plan to get into place before they charged you.
Oh and monsters don't always come from vents...though they usually do...In the game's defense, it's implied that they use the vents to travel throughout the station, getting into seemingly locked down areas by using the air conditioning, but there are many times when I saw a vent, went "OHOHO, I SEE THROUGH YOUR GRANDIOSE PLAN!" and then nothing happened. They seem to come out of vents half the time and with that in mind, I have acquired a mild fear of vents from these last two installments. There was also that time (SPOILY SPOIL SPOILER) where a necromorph just broke through the top of the tiny elevator isaac happened to be riding and got puke all over his good suit.
Lastly, I agree with the whole limbs come off too easy thing, at least with the corpses and isaac's deaths, but dead bodies you find around have skin and flesh stripped off with exposed ribcages, bones broken(sometimes) and marks where the blades either penetrated or slashed. And the later necromorphs actually take a bit of shooting to de-limb. If one finds the game too easy or hard, you can always change the difficulty mid-game...another thing I expected yahtzee to mention because I seem to remember him complaining about how, in most games, you can?t change difficulties.
Lastly lastly (sigh), the only near instantaneous transformation I remember was in the very beginning. When infectors transform later on, they do it on corpses that have been dead for a while and the whole process takes like...I dunno, 6-12 seconds before the necromorph is battle ready? That?s enough to fumble around and try to murder the flying vagina before you have another Abloogy-woogy-woo zombie to deal with.