A really pretty game, I enjoyed it. I think that figuring out the routing and the stamina management could have been a bit harder though.
Also what I felt was a noticeable flaw was that I wanted to explore and collect as much as I could, but it was too difficult to tell which direction was optional instead of mandatory. So I ended up backtracking a lot of the time (because I wanted to avoid getting locked out of a previous section) but I would end up choosing the actual progression route and doing just that, lmao.

Cool game, pretty. Adding melee combat is a big improvement over the first game.
I wish some of the basic enemies had better telegraphs for when they were doing their attacks though, especially the big guys or the spiders. Not that big of an issue though, pretty easy to just have enough health to tank hits and heal later.
Also it was kind of weird how the platforming is usually pretty simple, with occasional spikes in difficulty, and then some of the bosses seemed surprisingly tough out of the blue.

Surprisingly this is an okay game to play if you're patient, though there's still some quirks to actually completing the main story; I would definitely keep a close eye on the UESP wiki to figure out which reputations you're supposed to raise in order to even make progress. But if you could stomach playing Morrowind for the first time nowadays and were bored and saw that Daggerfall is free on Steam, maybe give this a shot to see how it is. Don't forget to enable Player Nudity on launch, lmao.

The dungeons are incredibly dense, and it's pretty crazy that they even had a fully 3d map on original release, although Unity actually lets you zoom in and change the viewing angle. It should be noted that there's a couple dungeon tiles that are absolute bullshit, like one tile where you have to push a generic wall torch to remove a plain looking wall, revealing a hidden tunnel to a few extra rooms which could contain your objective. Another tile features red brick walls that act as teleport points — these same red brick walls are featured randomly in other tiles, so you would have seen them and had no reason to actually walk into the ones that actually teleport you...

This game is still super magic heavy like in Arena, especially for breaking paralysis effects put on you, as well as for the recall, water walking, and levitation spells. Also apparently Unity 'fixed' the thicc vampire chicks in this game, so now the sleep spells they lob at you from a distance actually drain your stamina instead of doing nothing. Because this spell lasts for like 45 in-game minutes, it's almost guaranteed to knock you out and one-shot you unless you have spell effects to resist or reflect that spell entirely, it's kind of dumb honestly.

Exploring some of the main quest dungeons in this game honestly doesn't feel that bad in itself, I can appreciate the creativity in the layout of some of them. However the janky combat and various bugs do not really make this game worth visiting, though.

The combat really starts to fall apart like a third or halfway through the game, as enemies start melting your health much faster, especially the magic enemies that will constantly shoot high damaging spells at you, potentially killing you in 2-3 seconds. At this point you will be spending a lot of time pressing U, constantly activating effects to reflect/resist/absorb spells to negate magic enemies from a distance, and chugging Heal True potions when fighting in melee range (basic healing potions are a useless waste of money). Also enemies that paralyze you are bullshit too (spiders do it very frequently since the start of the game), so you always need some Free action potions on hand. But if it happens to you while you're swimming, it's instant death lol.
This game is weirdly focused on potentially exploring the hundreds of equipment shops across all of the towns in the world to buy upgrades, instead of actually finding them as loot. Aside from passive & active magic items like belts & bracelets, the only equipment that can roll as enchanted when you find them as loot from enemies or loot piles are daggers longswords and platehelms. And even then, they are always going to be the basic quality instead of higher tiers such as elven/ebony/etc. So if you get 2 or 3 staff pieces, instead of trying to explore all of the shops yourself, you should honestly just look at the UESP wiki for whatever items you would want to buy, because the shop stocks are static.


As far as some other tips for slogging through this game:
Press F4 to save a lot of time with all of the menuing/talking in this game.
If playing on DOSBox, the game will run slower if you drag the 'Detail' slider to the right... so just drag it all the way to the left lmao.
Cure/resist poison is literally useless until the very last dungeon of the game, don't bother keeping it in your inventory.
Leaving a daedric artifact-related dungeon and then coming back to it can apparently despawn the chest that contains the map/artifact, potentially softlocking you out of getting any artifacts in that playthrough if you do not have a backup save before you entered the dungeon. (You cannot get a quest for more daedric artifacts if you have one in your inventory, or the quest for it in your log.)
There's also various other bugs with NPC dialogue sending you to the wrong locations, or orange text on the screen being garbled, for me at least this was always fixed by exiting and reloading the game, though I don't know if this always works.
Passwall is a busted ass ability that can be a necessity if you can't picklock high level locks. Also if you ever have to swim to get into a room, you can often be bodyblocked from entering it if there are flying enemies in there. They will fly above you and prevent you from climbing up, so you either have to reposition them and use invisibility to try again, or use passwall to get inside if the enemy is a ghost that can see invisibility.


Also man Keys are way too small, if they're not on a platform or have no message indicating their existence in the room, they are incredibly easy to miss. There was also one absolute bullshit riddle in The Halls of Colossus, and overall the riddles weren't that good tbh.