This game is nowhere near as terrible or broken as all the review bombing makes it out to be. I think people's reaction to all the drama surrounding this game is way overblown and deliberately ignoring this game's merits and the improvements made to its combat system or the overall mechanics.
With that said, this game is also nowhere near as good as all these years of development should have made it out to be, especially when it touts itself as the successor of one of the most beloved adult text-based games of all time. There are many things this game does that just feel wrong when compared to its source material with how it handles some aspects of its adult content or the progression of the story.
For starters, the premice of this game's story doesn't match at all with the actual narrative experience the devs put the player through. CoC is supposed to take place after the events of CoC1, in a separate dimension that has been invaded by a demon from Mareth, the place CoC1 takes place in. This demon has apprently slowly been corrupting this new world, turning people against each other and turning them into sex-crazed maniacs; and the player is obviously there to stop her.
The problem here, is that this supposedly "pure" world the player has to save, is already fucked. By the time you leave the first area of the game, you quickly realize that everyone is already a sex-crazed maniac, willing to fuck around with anyone and has no qualms about killing or raping people from different tribes who stand on their way.
That demon is supposedly here to corrupt this world, but what is there left to corrupt? There are many elements that suggest this level of debauchery was present long before that demon came into the picture : The raccoon mother and her daughters, the different tribes warring with each other, the fact everyone is so easy going about sex, and that no one seems to feel the need to contain their urges to prevent them from raping everyone on sight. You as the player never feel the impact of that demon's corruption, because there is no transition from the previous state to the corrupted state; even if not everyone is as corrupt, no one as any qualms with sleeping with you or someone else if asked.
The old CoC1 dealt with this so much better, with the people in the overworld slowly going crazy, addicted to sex and almost incapable of rational thinking; the city of Tel'Adre, built to attempt (and fail) protect the last "pure" citizens from the corruption slowly taking over the world; the goddess Marae, the embodiment of purity that you can accidentally corrupt in a side quest; everything in CoC1 conveys that notion of corruption very well, down to the actions you as the player can do that affect the NPCs around you.
This lack of impact of the corruption is also visible in the mutation mechanic brought from CoC1, where you could mutate your body to change your species, which gradually increased your corruption, affected dialogues and even gave you new abilities in combat. But in CoC2, mutations are merely a cosmetic effect with no impact on combat nor on how NPCs treat you during the dialogues.
Be as corrupted as you want, be as much of an asshole as you want, you will still be able to access the same content as when doing a pure route, with NPCs reacting in the exact same way.
This honestly wouldn't be that bad if the story itself was engaging and the characters you meet along the way were likable and memorable. And unfortunately, very few of them are. I personnaly don't mind most of them, I think they're okay for the most part, but the problem comes with the insane amount of exposition dump the game does.
This game is long, unecessarily verbose, and at times, very pretentious, such as for the kitsune content that might as well be its own novel considering how out of place and wordy it is. From what I gathered from the other reviews, the main writer of this game, Savinmander, seems to have... Let's say, a very particular idea of what CoC2 should be, and that vision does not care whatsoever about being true to the original game.
If anything, this game, and especially the kitsune episode, feels like a self-insert fanfiction of CoC1 rather than its own sotry building of the original. An especially egregious example of this is the codex, filled with entries of the different creatures you fight and some lor about the world. To put it simply, you will read one, maybe two of them, and then never touch the codex ever again. No joke, I once fell asleep while reading these. Thankfully it's an optional section of the story just used for lore dumping, but it's a clear evidence of the writers' lack of focus and pretentious writing.
This story, in many ways, feels really disjointed. It does follow a main thread with the imp invasion and the main antagonist, but many of the quests you do feel disconnected from one another, with very little relevance to the overarching plot. This is due to the fact that there have been many writers working on this game, with most of the interactions we see are the result of commissions from Patreons, as well as the writers' self inserts and pet projects, thrown in there with little care for what the other writers have created, or even for the main plot itself.
It's not uncommon to meet characters - even team members than can join you on adventures - with wildly different artstyles and writing styles for their dialogues, who have one or two interactions with the MC before having their story thread being dropped immediately afterwards, as the writers quickly lose interest and are not interested of picking up the work of others if they aren't the creator themselves.
Speaking of artstyles, most characters are visually what you would expect from a game in that kind of setting, altough this game really suffers from what I call the "Monster Girl Quest" syndrome, where many NPCs were drawn by many different artists with artstyles of wildly different quality, most of that quality being at the bottom of the barrel.
I understand it's hard to coordinate everyone to put out some content of roughly the same level, and there are some artstyles I do really like, like Cait's or the dog girl at the nursery; but for the most part, the artstyle is very boring and forgettable, and they really clash when multiple people appear on screen at the same time.
It's nice the devs have implemented a real preview panel to let us see what the characters actually look like, but due to this game being a text-based game, the preview's usage is severely limited. It also doesn't help that, given who wrote the sex scenes, all of them are really wordy and overstay their welcome quite rapidly.
The original CoC also had boring dialogues and lengthy descriptions, but these at least were easily skippable, whereas here, skimming too quickly through a dialogue can make you miss important plot points and directions on where to go next. It's not uncommon at certain points of the game to just blindly pace between each previously visited area on the map, praying you might trigger a new event that has popped up to continue the story.
Onto the gameplay. While it is much more functional and involved than in the original, it still unfortunately has some problems that drag it down a bit.
First of all, the exploration part of CoC1 is completely gone here, and I really don't understand why. Exploring was one of CoC's best features, where you would randomly discover a new biome and go "Wow, that's new, what kind of items and monsters will I encounter?" It did so much for the immersion and making the story feel like a real adventure, but the devs of CoC2 chose not to bring that into their game, and I just think it's a downgrade in that department.
Instead, the game railroads you from one area to the next without giving you much room to explore and find secret areas or new biomes. The game pretends to have different regions you can choose to complete in any order, but what happens is that you run into enemies way above your power level and you get curbstomped every single time, leaving you very little paths to explore. The beginning of the game is especially rough in that regard, where going east or south will immediately kill you, leaving you only the northern forest to explore early one. I don't get that this false pretense of choice brings to the game, when the dev clearly had a more linear story structure in mind.
As for the combat, I find it much more involved and developed than in CoC1. You character has multipe stats, attacks and spells they can use in combat, and even a class system dictating what kind of abilities you have. This allows you to make very different builds depending on whether or not you want to play more offensively, defensively or just acting as support for your allies. The latter are also a new addition, which each teammate having its own set of attacks and spells, and even different builds for some of them.
Which is great, and it's a pretty alright system honestly, but doing the actual fighting doesn't feel that great. Each encounter gets really wordy because of the sheer number of participants on screen, with sometimes for than 4 enemies per battle. Stats and paragraphs just fly by so quickly and so frequently, it's impossible to follow accurately what's going on at any given point, expect by watching the health bars rising or decreasing and determining which of your attacks deal the most damage.
It also doesn't help that many enemies have healing abilities, which can turn some encounters into serious slogs, where no side can ever outdamage the other unless by sheer luck. The game does give you some strong teammates, but some fights can last for like 10 minutes or something just because everyone keeps spamming buffs or healing. At best, it's very forgettable, at worst it's very annoying.
There are many other things I could talk about that don't feel right about this game, but I'd be rehashing what everyone else has already said. On a technical standpoint, the game is much more polished and depthful that it's original source, at the cost of everything else. The main plot is neglected half the time in profit of self-inserts and fanfictions, the lore dump is agressive and almost never used over the course of the story, the combat has its base elements set up but they are never exploited in a way that feels good.
I honestly expected CoC2 would be a community effort to show their appreciation of the merits of the original game, but it seems to have been hijacked by some of Fenoxo's friends who decided to make it their playground for their own fetishes and fanfictions, rather than a genuine story with interesting characters.
If you liked the original simply because of the sheer amount of adult content here, and you don't care about the story, you might still find something enjoyable here. If you're coming in expecting a good story, or a continuation of where CoC1 left off, feel free to skip it, you won't miss anything important.
