Very good overall game. Solid improvement over Portia in all aspects Portia was bad in, and most aspects in general.

Story: 7/10. Starts off good, goes really really stupid in mid-act 2 through early act 3 (it comes off as a panicked re-write because a certain someone got too popular), recovers somewhat in the end.

Gameplay: 9/10. Lots of QoL improvements over Portia like being able to pull mats and crafts directly from your storage to turn in for commissions. The bones are the same for the most part.

Graphics: 8/10. Looks far better than Portia, especially in terms of character models. The shaders are massively busted atm and no one really knows why, so that knocks a point off.

Voice acting: 7.5/10. Far more consistently decent than Portia. Some weird inexplicable stuff like a couple characters switching VAs randomly.

Characters: 8/10. Most characters are lovely. My favs are Mi-an, Justice, and Unsuur. A few that are annoying and/or uncompelling for a variety of reasons. Definitely more hits than misses by a longshot. Unfortunately they fell into the same trap they did with Portia in that they gave some characters way way more stuff than others.

Overall: 8.5/10 (here rounded to 9 or 4.5 stars). With a few tweaks and content updates for the less fleshed out characters it could easily clear 9, and I'll definitely be playing it again at some point.

I always have a hard time succinctly describing my feelings on this game, because it's one of the best superhero games I've ever played and yet just thinking about playing it is exhausting on some level. When the fights are at their best, it's about as good as Arkham-style combat can be, forcing you to do a little dance of managing smaller orcs while trying to work your way around the captain's specific resistances and immunities. There are always credible threats to your health, but there are so many ways to turn things in your favor that it doesn't really ruin the power fantasy when your near-death experience is also a chance to instantly counter and decapitate some idiot loser who thinks this is his chance to kill you.

I just... don't care about the rest of it? The world is too big and the regions feel too similar, there's more Nemesis interactions than the previous game but when you get to a higher level it's just too exhausting to keep track of all of them. There's like a hundred of these bozos and they're all mad at me for cutting their arm off and buddy, get in line. I don't care about gear! I don't care about sending hitmen to rival captains or customizing my Tolkien tigers to spit Baja Blast or Code Red during a siege. These systems aren't really deep enough to feel like you're doing anything, and they have almost no stakes other than one more orc yelling at you. It's primarily exhausting because the player is obviously meant to find them equally compelling - unless you're dying constantly, deciding to go out and do the fun part of the game (running into a fort and killing the strong guys) means you just... win? The way the AI generates new characters isn't frequent or aggressive enough to counter the player, even when the difficulty is cranked up. It's truly a bizarre design decision to have the player beset on all sides by uncountable hordes of enemies in the plot and then decide in the gameplay that the AI armies will never chip away at your gains unless you let them. Those late-game fights against strong captains forcing you to get creative single-handedly carry this to a low 7/10 score, because without the variety in combat, even the nemesis system couldn't save the mess created by tacking on all these other systems.