Overview:
Rincewind the magician is back, and his latest adventure has him looking to find Death. Yep, that is right, Death, the big robed guy with the sickle. Nobody liked the idea of being immortal because, let's face it, life just isn't that great most of the time. Anyway, it is up to you, as Rincewind, to find Death and get him back to doing his duties.

As the sequel to Discworld, Discworld II has some new goodies to add to the game including better graphics, a huge new world to explore, and more than 25,000 hand-drawn cells of animation. The one thing that remains the same is the snappy one-liners and off-the-wall humor in the voice-overs done by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame.

Gameplay:
Discworld II is best described as a point-and-click adventure game. You are in control of Rincewind, the bumbling magician, who can hardly even tie his own shoes. Following you around is your luggage chest complete with legs to walk on. The gameplay consists of finding objects and interacting with these objects, as well as with other people. All of your interaction with people is predetermined in what you say, but you do have the ability to choose if you want to ask a question, say something sarcastic, or just talk with them.

By looking at my score, you would believe that this game is not too good. I caution you on this, because this game is not bad for the type of game that it is. It does have some problems, but mostly I just don't really like this type of game. Discworld II takes everything I don't like about point-and-click and adventure games and packages them together, making it difficult for me to struggle through. The reason it got as high of a score as it did was because I know that fans of this type of game will enjoy it more than I did.

First, let's start out with the strengths of this game. The world that you have to explore is massive. You could play this game for 2 hours and still not visit all of the locations available. One complaint the game manufacturing industry has had about this type of game is that they are usually relatively short. Not the case here. You will not be able to finish this game in less than two or three days.

Next, the puzzles were very complex. Almost nothing was very obvious. You had to be very creative in your attempts to secure object and items. Some things were as easy as asking for them or just picking them up, and other things you had to talk to the people in a specific pattern or they would not give up the items. This definitely added a difficulty factor to the enormous environments.

The other thing I really liked about the game was the humor. Everyone had a smart-ass comment or a twisted name. I was constantly chuckling to myslef as I played the game. Each of the people you must interact with have very unique personalities and you will quickly get a feeling about who is helpful and who is not.

Now for the bad. First, and foremost, I don't have the patience to play these games. The game goes along at the pace of a fleet of grandmas driving on a Sunday afternoon. First, you must sit through 15 minutes of animations before the game even starts. Then, you are stuck listening to peoples' irrelevant babble all of the time. My reaction to this may be from my MTV generation background, but I think many people will find this game to be too slow.

Speaking of slow, that is another thing that plagued this game. Not only was the action slow, but the game itself was slow to load. You will have plenty of time to watch the loading screen because it seemed that every 3 screens, the game would have to load something. Then, once the screen was loaded, if any movement happened, your cursor would stutter. This was particularly annoying because you luggage followed you everywhere and had moving legs. Every time you entered a room, you cursor would stutter for 3-5 seconds. I don't even want to talk about screens that load other animations.

The last thing that bothered me about this game was that it was a bit ridiculous in expectations. What I mean by this is that you must talk to people in a sequential order to get information. For example, you must first say something sarcastic, then ask a question, then greet them. If you do not do it in this order, you will not get the information you are seeking.

Graphics:
The animations—once loaded—are great. The backgrounds and drawings are also excellent. Everything looked to be straight out of a cartoon world. On the downside, I can't help but blame the graphics for the slowing and loading problems. Also, there were occasions that I had trouble seeing items because they blended into the backgrounds and were hidden.

Bottom Line:
Discworld II is not my type of game. Aside from the slowdown problems and frequent loading, fans of this genre will probably like this title. For people who really don't enjoy this type of game or people who have never played one before, I suggest you pass on by.