Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder

A shockingly good game
Ok, I'll be upfront and state, from the beginning, that due to this game being gifted to me by a friend who has horrifying taste in videogames (hi Mike, love ya mate), my expectations were...not that high. Obviously, my expectations were blown out of the water, which is why I am going to try and convince you to give this game a try.
The good
Artstyle: the best thing about this game to me is the artstyle and, naturally, the way each different artstyle is used. I'm not a massive fan of the "life was better 30 years ago when games had fewer pixels" kind of boomer talk and I don't really like or go out of my way to find pixel-art games, it's just not my cup of coffee. That being said, the 3 time periods in the game that use different kinds of 2d pixel art are, to be brutally honest, just lovely. The look of each time period is unique, the way some places you can traverse in a time period but not in another is quite interesting (sometimes annoying too, we'll get to that). The one 3d time period is naturally nothing to write home about but it still fits perfectly well with its predecessors and sets it apart exceedingly well. All of that leads us very conveniently to
Gameplay: mind, gameplay in and of itself isn't anything to write home about. Especially for the first few hours, you whack stuff with a button, charge a more powerful whack move with the same button, solve a few puzzles her and there, move about and that's mostly it. The way gameplay differs in the different time periods though, especially when it comes to traversing areas which can be done in one period but not in another, makes one remember which area they can go through when and plan accordingly which, while not very important in the grand scheme of things, is quite neat. Gameplay in general is also good, to me, because it's strictly tied to
Variety: this is the big one. At first the gameplay is as simplistic as it can possibly get. Very soon platforming is added (which, thank goodness isn't overwhelming as I'm dreadful at it) and it's followed by a veritable plethora of different minigames. There's do damn many of them! Some might be more to your liking than not (I loathed every second of my time with the bejeweled and the shmup ones, for instance) but none of them lasts for too long and they keep the game shockingly fresh, attention and gameplay-wise because you truly have no idea what's coming up next. Will it be a street fighter ripoff? A yu-gi-oh ripoff? A guitar hero ripoff? The possibilities are endless! And unironically cause of a lot of fun because of how preposterous some of them are, in the context in which they're presented to you. Big thumbs up for this, unironically wish more games had done this sort of thing.
Characters: now, my dear friend Mike hated me for renaming every single character in the game (sorry but Fina and Menos sound dumb af in my native language, no way I'd leave them as is) but that in itself at least to me was great because when I renamed the characters (either with names I've used several other times or with tongue-in-cheek ones) it made me grow attached to each of them much more than I otherwise would have. That minor part out of the way, I can also say that the characters (Violet to a lesser extent, from a personal point of view) are all great. There's no huge backstory or detailed lore or what have you, but they are well writen, they remain true to their character to the (bitter) end and are just a joy to have around. If anything, I wish there was more banter between all of them as the MC is obviously silent.
Music: I don't have a lot to say about it, other than it works incredibly well with each different era and each major enemy/boss fight you come across. Remarkably good.
The mid or "your mileage may vary"
Humour & references: now, I loved the humour. Absolutely loved it to bits. It made me giggle or at the very least smile but as with all humour, especially one's that's full of callbacks and references to other videogames or cultural phenomena, it'll depend on your taste whether you like it or not. In addition to that, there's references everywhere and I do mean everywhere. I usually find this sort of thing forced and deeply gratuitous but at least for this game, I really liked it (and it had me google references to games I'd never played nor heard much about too, funnily enough). When you talk to a total ditz of a character and you get an achievement that references bioshock infinite, well, it sure made me laugh at the very least. But again, as with the humour, it'll be up to you whether seeing lara croft, link, mario etc etc is too much for you or not. I think it's done very well and doesn't detract from the rest of the game but each to their own.
Story: I think the story is neat but I had to look up several posts on reddit to actually see how it is neat (and frankly speaking, rather bleak). I get it I get it, show don't tell blahblahblah, I really don't care for it in the slightest. Again, a matter of taste and while the story on its face is pretty bare-bones, if you don't have a tiny brain like yours truly, you might enjoy it far more than I did at first. I simply prefer games that tell a story rather than have you work out the most importants part of it by yourself, that's basically it.
The annoying
Traversal: so, remember when 10 hours ago I mentioned that travelling through the world can be interesting and requires some kind of planning due to era-specific accesibility of locations? You do? How attentive of you! But to expand on that, the whole going through this area to get to that other one in this specific era is fine and cool the first say, 10-15 hours. The game does most assuredly not last 10-15 hours. Steam puts it at 30+ but realistically it's like 25ish and the last 10 of those were mostly me being deeply irked by the fact that I had to go to a place that's 80000kms away from where I wanted to go because where I wanted to go was only available in one era and where I had to go was available in a different one...it's not like it takes forever, the world is tiny, but it piles on really fast.
And you know what? The entire problem is entirely avoidable! When you go for your first key you simply need to go for the one you can access from the wind valley (and the green-pixellated world within, to be light on spoilers) and you get a very comfy very useful flying machine that renders basically all obstructions inconsequential. The catch? There's 5 of those keys to collect and nothing really that tells you to go collect THAT one first, so if you're lucky like me and do it last, basically just before the ending, well, **** you I guess, hope you enjoyed spending minutes on end trudging and boating around when you could have just flown everywhere. As a design decision, putting something THAT useful behind a toss of the dice is just silly to me.
Choices and consequences: "change history but beware of the consequences" says the trailer for this game.
There are no consequences stemming from active choices you make. None. This isn't even a "clementine will remember that" kind of pointless rubbish, this is a "you actually have to make that choice, there's no other" followed by a "damn, look at the consequences tho!". Almost all the "choices" you make are things anyone with a functioning cerebellum would choose so boasting about choices you don't make is pretty nonsensical, in my opinion. Story is still good and there are consequences to your on-rail choices but of course there would be in a game with TIME TRAVELLING.
Conclusions
Buy this game. That's all I have to say about it (in reality, there aren't any characters left for this review because I'm so damn verbose ok, just leave me alone). And hey, thanks for this game Mike!
Cheers!

What an incredibly fun experience that was.
On top of a ton references to 'gaming pop culture', the gameplay and story don't disappoint.
Evoland 2 is not just a nod to the greatest of all time, it comes amazingly close on its own.

Evoland 2 feels like what the first title wishes it was. It's much bigger, more ambitious, and more polished than the first game; it constantly switches between art styles and gameplay modes, and the story's pretty fun, centered around time travel through different gaming periods; it still has a ton of references to gaming culture; the characters have more personality and are more fleshed out. It generally feels more like a complete game.
The drawbacks are its pacing; it feels a bit all over the place; some sections feel longer than they should've been; the combat starts to feel repetitive/samey over the course of 20 hours or so; a few puzzles are convoluted; the story, while having more to say, can feel murky. The game occasionally feels like a collection of ideas rather than one cohesive experience.
In general, Evoland 2 remains enjoyable; however, it would have been even more entertaining if it had prioritized the development of some of its more innovative concepts, rather than hopping from one to the other. I'd say it's worth picking up during a sale, as it's a decently fun, retro love letter to the classics.

Evoland 2 is the rare nostalgia-driven game that earns its premise. Normally, the whole “remember this?” routine can feel cheap and pandering, but here it’s handled with a surprising amount of care and creativity. The constant shifts in genre and era feel more like a celebration of gaming history than a cynical callback machine.

The pixel art is consistently charming, and while the soundtrack doesn’t quite reach standout status, it does its job well enough to support the mood. Where the experience stumbles, at least for me, is in pacing and navigation—it's far too easy to get turned around or unsure of where to go next, which can break the flow. That frustration is compounded by the painfully slow movement speed, which makes backtracking feel like a chore.

Still, despite those annoyances, there’s a lot of heart here. It’s clever, varied, and clearly made with affection for the medium. A flawed but genuinely enjoyable homage.

A fun and cute yet short collectathon chock full of references

It's... fine.
The first one was a fun deconstruction of the tropes and technology of the RPG’s across the decades.
This one have some good ideas, but it is so… bland, and boring. The story is bland and boring, the gameplay is bland and boring, the time travel with generation jump was better in the first one, here is bland and boring. Even the Easter-eggs are bland and boring (do you recognize this? Wasn’t that game fun? Doesn’t this character resembles that character from that franchise?) … it’s just memberberries. Even the dialog and jokes are bland and boring, currently it could’ve been made with AI.
The game is fine. It is just fine. If you like a top-down Zelda RPG type game with some cool gimmicks then this game is… fine.

The first Evoland was a gimmick-based game. As you move through the game, the graphics update from very primitive 2D to pretty good 3D; while the gameplay is a mishmash of different genres. I liked it, don't get me wrong, but it's fairly shallow, especially narratively. For the sequel, the developers took the idea of using historical graphical styles to represent different periods of in-game history, and converted that to a very solid and varied RPG with a deep and non-linear story.
Most of this game is an action hack-n-slash, be it in isometric 3D, top-down 2D, or side-on platformer. However, there are also many, many sections which change it up, with a much wider variety than in the previous game. Match-three, bullet hell, party-based ATB systems, puzzles, one-on-one fighter, beat-em-up... they're all there and more. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it keeps things fresh and never stagnant. But the negative is that you need pretty diverse tastes or you'll eventually hit something you don't like, or don't think is well implemented.
But it's the game's story that I find most interesting. I don't want to go into too much detail to avoid spoilers. But, despite starting with the cliche of the hero waking up with amnesia, the game goes on to tell a complex and non-linear story with ambiguous motivations and conclusions. A lot of stuff is left implicit, which I mean here as a positive: this rewards paying attention and also interpretation. The characters also all have distinct and well-realised personalities; I liked how a particular romantic relationship was clear, despite I think no romantic language being used.
Imaginative and inventive, Evoland 2 is great.