Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Grows on you"

Deponia 2 (Chaos on deponia) is the second installment in Daedelics adventure game trilogy located on Deponia, a junk world where people are trying to scrape out a minor existence. Its main positive are a memorable setting, interesting characters and funny dialogue. While the negatives would be a not very well thought through story and weaker beginning and ending, compared to the rest of the game.

Graphics 9/10
Being an adventure game technically proficient graphics do not matter, what matters is, that the graphics are artistically proficient. The unique world of Deponia - a world with heaps of junk, buildings out of junk, shops selling junk, a sea full of floating junk - creates a really good artistic impression. Whereas in the first installment most of the game took place in a quiet backwater village, most of the second installment takes places in a somewhat larger town. Besides places, the character textures are good as well.

Audio 10/10
Let me make one thing clear in the beginning of this section - I played the German original voice over, I have no idea to the quality of the english one, so if you plan to play in english do not pay attention to this section. Now that that's over with, I can safely say I loved both the dialogue as well as music in the game. As to the music, the soundtrack is comparable to the first one, it has place in my win media player. As to the voice acting, I have thorougly enjoyed it.For me perhaps the best speech in games in the last 2 years (since mass effect 2). The dialogues are mainly very funny, the main character as well as other characters make puns all the time, the good thing is that the puns are easy to understand and usually don't required that much special knowledge (unlike some other games where unless you are a coach potato you will not understand the puns). Comparing to the first installment I enjoyed the conversations even more, this was mainly due to the fact that unlike the first installement, the main male hero (Rufus), now has quite a few conversation with the female lead (Goal), whereas in the first installment there were less conversation with her. This is of course personal preference, but I found the Rufus-tries-so-hard-to-impress-the-female conversations to be the funniest.

Story 7/10
Well, I must say the story of the first installment was a bit better, even though the second installement is just continuing the story of the trilogy, but I have enjoyed where they took the story. The overall story presentated in the first installment is to prevent the destruction of Deponia by an elite organisation overseeing the planet, the two story arcs added in this game include - have Goals personality divided into three separates and Rufus tried to piece them togther AND to prevent the drop of a bomb on the planet. While I have thoroughly enjoyed the divided Goal as it created loads of funny situations and conversations and was perhaps the best part of the game (who would not want a remote control for his girlfriend?), the second part with the bomb was confusing and not a good addition. Add to this the fact the start has a strange story arc which I did not understand (so it takes whole days for the capsule to reach Elysium so that Rufus is able to shoot it down?) and that the ending is simply too good (the devs got bhammered about the ending of the first part being too bad, so they made it too good this time), and all you get are parts of the story being bad which brings down the overall story.

Gameplay 8/10
Point and click, tried and tested, old and new, the not bad and not innovative (besides the inventory on mousewheel). Not much to say about gameplay, classic gameplay. Perhaps a positive is that the maps are large (covering quite a few screens for an adeventure game at the same time), so the number of items in inventory gets larger so you have more combinations to try, add to that the fact that a lot of items are reused (I find it stupid when every item in an adventure game has exactly and only one use) and you get decent gameplay. Not much else can be said.

Replayability 6/10
As with every adventure the replay value is low. It could have been improved if there were different solutions to problems, which there are not. The only 2 replays facts I can imagine are - if you know two language and would try different voice over OR by the time the third installement comes out you need to recap what has happened and don't remember all the funny conversations again.

All in all I would storngly recommend Deponia 2 to the average adventure gamer, alas people who rather enjoy different types of game (FPS, RTS) might not be that interested as even as good as it is, it is not the best adventure game ever (which still goes to The Longest journey), though the funny conversations and characters make up for certain lacks on the story part.