Graphics

The Good

BW2, like the other two games in the series, is based on last year's Nocturne engine. The Nocturne engine was a graphical milestone in late 1999, and the good news is that it's still holding its own a year later.

Nocturne's engine not only renders an incredible visual product, but the majority of the technologies were designed with the intention of being used as mood devices (usually used to scare the crap out of you). Foremost amongst these technologies is the dynamic lighting system, shadows and movements are dynamically assigned by the engine based on real-time light sources, which brings our worst fear, the dark, to the screen in all its perfect nature.

She's all kinds of sexy.

Stopping for a breather.

BW2 made use of this in a few scenes, but for the most part the game takes place in either the daylight of the civil war period, or the dusk of the later, post-war period. Very rarely are you surrounded by darkness with a high contrast light source, which is where the Nocturne engine really turns heads.

The backgrounds of BW2 are also very well done, though the skies are covered in a perpetual mist and fog. In most games we would mumble about a cheap trick in regards to the fog, but in BW2 the weather is appropriate given your position in one of the eeriest forests in the history of eerie forests.

Those sticks mean: 'The living need not apply.'

Robin, damn you, always running off.

The Bad and the Ugly

The Nocturne engine is incredibly powerful, with wonderful tools for a developer to make use of. Our major complaint is that Human Head didn't take advantage of the Nocturne engine. The aforementioned absence of the use of dynamic lighting to elicit mood is one example.

The Nocturne engine also has one of the coolest features to hit adventure games in a long time, that of a cloth modeling system. To put it in a nutshell, the cloth modeling system allows a coat or another piece of clothing to be presented as it should be relative to it's wearers movement. If you whirl as your character, his coat unfurls around him, whirl back the other way, and it spins back the other way in mid-movement. This exceptionally neat piece of technology is really only used very rarely in BW2.

About face action.

Follow me, I know the way.

The post-war Lazarus wears a shawl-esque coat over his torso, and this you can whirl around to your heart's content. You'll spend about half of your time in the post-war Lazarus, and half of your time in his union uniform. Most of the characters in the game bear clothing similar to the civil war era Lazarus, with tight clothes barely discernible from their skin.

Another issue is animation and modeling. The number of animations your character has is minimal at best. Lazarus barely squeaks by with an animation for every appropriate situation, he has a "getting hit" animation and a "running" animation, but just one for each. A more varied smorgasbord of animations would have been nice to keep things form becoming repetitive.

Drawing the saber.

Using said saber.