Tim Stuart

I loved the first Ori, healthy frustration not withstanding. Beautiful story, gorgeous graphics (for a side scroller), challenging gameplay, and amazing music. However, the new one is a major disappointment so far. It's buggy, lacks direction far worse than the first, only half attempted custom control layouts, and the designers clearly didn't intend it to be played with a controller but this game SHOULD be intended for a controller. This is because they ramped up the difficulty of obstacle navigation and apparently forgot that the pinky is the least dexterous finger on your hands yet you have to make numerous switches between cntrl and shift to make split second decisions when you can't see enough of the area you're traversing to know what decision to make in the first place. The lack of direction will have you scratching your head about whether you have the correct power to reach certain areas, yet you will try, and possibly succeed, without the required power after 100 frustrating deaths only to find out that you had no need to be in that area yet. The first game had an issue where the difficulty would drastically change back and forth between boringly easy and hair tearingly hard. I don't mind a hard challenge, but consistency with difficulty can make or break a game. Will of the Wisps overshadows that problem 10 fold. The map is obnoxious as when you're trying to view a specific part of the map, the slightest hover over one of the objectives on the left of the screen shoots your view to an irrelevant part of the map. Speaking of the map, it's 2-3 times larger than the last game, which isn't an issue until you have to go hunting for quest items or npc's that you're given little to no useful information about. You will most certainly get lost for ridiculous amounts of times trying to find someone or something that is probably somewhere else entirely. That being said, the music, scenery, and story are as beautiful as the first Ori. Sadly, having a heartwarming plot and beautiful graphics won't save a game if the controls suck and the difficulty changes like the wind. The game plays like it was only tested for a week by people who already knew what to look for and where to go which, spoiler alert, sucks for the people who don't already know what to do and where to go. It had so much potential to be better than the first, but the designer's got greedy adding mechanics to the game that only muddied the waters more. I had such high hopes for this sequel and they ended up lowering the bar. Shame.