Blackguards 2

Blackguards 2 is a more combat-focus version of Blackguards 1.
While BG 1 was an RNG fest, BG2 removed so many of the annoying RNG and made strategical plays and puzzle stages a lot more common. Boss fights have you running around trying to abuse the stage hazard to the fullest to win. Certain stages will force you to complete objectives and leave or face infinite spawns unlike the old one where you can kill EVERYTHING except for one stage where you run away from the poison.
Outside of combat, you can now interact with characters more unlike the old one. You can capture prisoners, and interrogate them. Based on a choice, you can either make them spill the beans or spit at you. The informations required to make them answer can be obtained by paying for information from your beggar spies or by speaking around in your camp. After the interrogation, you can decide whether to hang them or let them go. Letting them go can be good but sometime, a certain person might come back to fight you again.
The customization has been greatly simplified. You no longer have the Strength, Charisma, etc from BG1. Instead, you just go with "+10 health" "+10 mana" "unlock tier 1 passive" in a straight line. Weapon level goes froml 1 - 100 and you unlock tier bonus at 50 80 100. While this means no weight limit from the removal of STR (Yes! No more weight issue!), it means much less customization. Even your mages will have as much hp as a fighter at the end making them unkillable.
And with that, let's move on to the balancing.
Endurance has been introduced. In BG1, all you had to do was buff someone and spam that 3x damage move like Hammer blow or Triple shot. You can't anymore. Endurance works like Astral point. When you use a combat skill, you use 10-20 points from you 40-80 endurance pool based on your stat. You regenerate a certain amount each turn based on passive (Endurance Regeneration) and gear bonus.
You can now have 100% hit rate. So much yes! If your offence (Hit rate) is high enough now to deal with their defense, you will always hit. Dodge and parry is one once per turn so sniping someone with a weak arrow first will move your hit rate on any further hit from 75% to 100% on the next one. Bow is a special case and its offense is reduced by range. You can easily check if you can hit people with bow now by simply holding X and moving around. It will show everything in range, the base hit rate and if the enemies are within the Line of Sight or not. Extremely useful and needed feature.
Damage is now consistent. Assuming no armor, if it says 6 damage, it will always deal 6 damage. Skills like "Hammer blow" was nerfed from *3 damage to +10 damage.
Most poison now lasts the entire fight and there are "Buff potions" around as well now.
And if you have nothing to do with your belt slot, they introduced the "Trinket" items that will boost your status while you are holding. Higher crit rate, damage or regeneration. All up to you!
You can place your characters starting location at the start of the battle now!
You can place traps in defensive stages when the enemies decide to attack your base (For every 3-4 conquers, they will attack once)
This should cover most of the new features. Now we will move on to the last part. The pro and con of this games.
Pro
-You now control an army. While everything was nerfed. this is because most combat now have you control 6-10 characters fighting against 6-15 characters as well. Before, you would just control one person with buff + Fast as lightning and tripleshot everything to death.
-Less RNG. More strategical plays and planning required to beat the game.
-Great dialogue just like BG1.
-Set bonus! Yes! no more "Just armor rating +1 and encumbrance reduction" now. You actually get stats from wearing a certain set!
-Your action now decide how good your characters will be and if they will be alive at the end or not. If you want, for the laugh of it, you can even order to execute your friends at the end before reloading a save after seeing their reactions.
Con
-Horribly unbalance. In BG1, all you do is abuse the same damaging weapon move like Triple shot or Hammer blow with buffs and fast as lightning to kill EVERYTHING. In BG2, with the damaging spell buffs and set items, mages are the most op beings ever in an army vs army fight. All you have to do is spam the same AoE spell to destroy everything in 3 - 4 turns assuming it's a "Kill everything" stage.
-Defensive battle doesn't give AP. The fight is already having you fight with gimped characters.
-Certain stage is horribly tedious, even more tedious than the last one. Infinite spawn happens every 2-3 stages and you have to do the "Rush in, Rush out" kind of gameplay. It's not fun because after you move all your 8 characters to the end of the stage, you also have to wait for the other 10 characters on the enemies side to move. You end up spending 10-15 minutes on this stage just waiting for everything to move. If only they would tone these down and give us a way to stop the spawning.
-Very buggy. Still playable though.
-There's only stage with the Lizard-chan throughout the whole game. WTF?
Final Verdict : 7/10.
Blackguards 2 feel like a DLC content with improved mechanic because that's exactly what it is, but we also have to remember it's being sold at a DLC price as well. Also, NEED MORE ACHAZ FFS.

Linear SRPG but with plenty of cool features that open up as you go, making the game feel more expansive. Really cool (but dark) writing and dialogue too, and some interesting characters overall. And combat is SWEET, very fun to utilize what's on offer there. Overall really good stuff, enjoying it!

Absolutely gorgeous game.
A must for fans of turn based tactical games and who also love the rpg elements of char development and inventory management.
The game delivers in fluff, content and story telling with strenght, the voice acting is very high level and the characters and the story itself are deep.
Once you got your initial squad and get a platoon of mercenaries (your cannon fodder) ready, the game turns into a campaign and then you get more of a macro strategy feel to it.
In sum , I love it.

Great game, story line is quite good, combat is engaging enough to keep you til the end.

Honestly having a lot of fun with this game. The voicing is consistently very good and the story is engaging. I quite enjoy the humor. Some of the fights are grueling but that's the nature of the genre. Definitely a hidden gem IMO.

Simply put, this game has a really odd story line. One minute I was murdering villagers to get more AP, the next I was letting prisoners go out of the kindness of my heart. Strangely it was all a lot of fun.
At first I didn't like the main character. She was a evil looking thing with boils covering half her face, but after her personality develops she is pretty interesting. I initially thought she was going to be evil the entire game, but not so. She turns out to be a pretty cool chick that just got in with some bad dudes.
One thing I wasn't so sure about is that you don't get to "make" your own character, but you can develop the main character anyway you want. Also she has a lot of speaking scenes and good voice acting which makes up for the inability to create your character from scratch. Also you only get 4 customizatable characters, which feels lacking to me for some reason. Also while they start off with alot to say, by mid game they just repeat the same old crap. One character, you can't even speak to after mid game. You see him sitting there, but that's it, you can't select to chat with him.
I didn't really like the way items and equipment were introduced to the characters. Some weapon types had a lot of really good weapons, while others didn't have much. Maybe it was on a loot table and I just got the good sword items and missed out on the good axe items. Too bad no one in my group used swords.
The story was odd, as I said earlier, but still interesting. I saw a lot of choices, which I always tried to pick the good one, except when AP was up for grabs. The interrogation process was interesting, but I failed most of them. :P Finally I figured out that I should save before I start the interrogation, and reload after I fail it. During the interrogation, you try to figure out what is the best way to handled the one you are interrogating. You can intimidate them, lie to them, or make them an offer. From what I could tell, they provide you with some information is you get everything right. Like I said, I did fail most of these.
The character customization was pretty good too. You have a lot of stuff to spend your AP on. Almost everything is at least a little useful. The only problem is all your characters except Cassia come predisposed to certain weapon types, so it doesn't make sense to change it. I ended up using Naurim's starter axe through the entire game. I would of loved to have switched him to something better, but I just never found anything better.
On the battle field is where this game shines though. Lots of stuff to do, and losts of stuff to watch out for. Only problem with them is a lot of the maps aren't as developed as I would like, but still most battles are really fun.

This game is much easier than the first one. Didn't take a four + year break on this and knocked it back in two weeks. Just thought I'd start with that.
The voice acting is still stellar.
The locations are varied and many are pretty to look at.
The potion drinking sound is less annoying. THE POTION DRINKING SOUND IS LESS ANNOYING.
What kind of game is this, then? A turn based strategy game based on the Dark Eye setting where during battle you control a party of adventurers on a hex based grid. The strategy is important. This isn't a game where you shut your brain off but then again maybe you can on easy, I don't know.
Even though I enjoyed the first game I saw the negative reviews and thought the backwards slide in gameplay wouldn't be my thing but it was rather...fine. Not at all disruptive. I regret waiting so long to pick it up. The gameplay has been streamlined significantly and irritations such as percentage hit chance and encumbrance have been removed. Some things really do have to be removed at the alter of fun if you can't get the balance down right.
In the first game you control a party of four, but in Blackguards 2 you end up controlling a whole squad of various sizes due to the addition of mercenaries. For these extras you're essentially controlling nameless goons but at least there's background and a narrative reason as to why. There are many more enemies to fight at once now to make up for it and if you have absolutely zero patience, waiting for each enemy to perform their actions will drive you mad but it's not bad.
The story, as others have noted, isn't quite as good as Blackguards. Despite playing a named character with an easy to understand motivation for what they do, there's this closeness missing in 2 which the first game had between the whole cast. The returning characters aren't quite the same and their sudden inclusion was a bit head scratching. I mean I knew they were coming but it wasn't as organic as the first game.
There's a lot of choice for how you make the main character play and what they say during dialogue. Unfortunately the returning cast talk a bit less which furthers the odd feeling of them being out of place but when it works it's still extremely entertaining due to their chemistry with each other.
But just like the first game this experience is unpolished. For all the nice scenery there are plenty of uninspired locations. There's a pause before an action is performed which probably adds up to a significant amount of time. There are many spells but over half of them you can do without or have extremely niche uses.
If the devs had stuck to making what they know and not imploded due to *that* game (so common in the games industry these days!) I'd be hopeful that a Blackguards 3 could keep changing things up. Needs to run on a new engine though.
Games like this get me interested in the setting. Some people didn't get into Dungeons and Dragons though the tabletop and were first introduced to the expansive world thanks to games like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale. I know that whoever owns the Dark Eye doesn't have that kind of money to throw around and studios have their own budgets but it would be nice for someone else to pick up the mantle of bringing more of this world to life.
I get it, there's better games out there and if you don't like the vibe and can't tolerate the smaller issues you'll bounce but it's a nice, serviceable, turn based strategy game to think about and kill some hours.