3.5/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Psychonauts 2.

Ah man I wish I loved this game more than I did. Psychonauts was one of my favourite games ever. It was the perfect blend of action, adventure, humour and story. Everything was well balanced, incredibly unique and creative, and downright hilarious. Psychonauts 2 continues the same trend, but deviates in a few ways that sort of broke the spell and left me feeling a bit flat. Firstly the plot is incredibly complicated. In a fairly short space of time, the game introduces at least 20 different characters, each with their own backstory, as well as a load of historical stuff designed to tie all events up as being relevant to Raz, and it is just impossible to really get into anyone or any particular story. I just gave up trying to follow the plot after a while. I think this meandering and sprawling story just made the game not work for me. I wasn’t invested in progress as I had no idea who anyone was or what was going on. Puzzlingly, two favourite characters from the first game - Sasha and Milla, are briefly included and then completely ignored for the entire game. The most enormous missed opportunity - they were so awesome! So you end up partnering up with a bunch of other characters who you are told are incredibly important and powerful but never actually do anything helpful or relevant. Ford thankfully does make an appearance but even then it just doesn’t seem to work. Loads of smaller niggles just dampened the experience further.... Namely the insanely long load times (longest load times I’ve experienced on PS4 other than GTA5), and how often the loading is required - I sat through an entire minute of a load screen just to watch a short cutscene, only to then get another one. This is just not acceptable these days. The dialogue was really dull as well - there was no interaction - it was just ‘ask a question, get an answer’, repeat. There was no ‘conversation’. Or at least it didn’t feel like it. I was just pressing x. Conversations may well have just been scripted events. Anyway. There was one thing I wanted to praise. And that’s the level design. True to Psychonauts style, each level takes place inside a different character’s mind, and the contents is entirely influenced by their psychological issues and traumas. And boy did the team knock it out of the park. The levels are simply mind-blowing and a spectacle to behold. The creativity and imagination that went into these is astounding and it was a joy to experience them. Even the ‘real world’ levels were interesting with loads to explore. The latter unfortunately being let down by very little need to re-explore areas. Unfortunately, the levels themselves just weren’t enough to raise this game up to the hopes I had for it.