Jesus Christ, Lords of Shadow 2 has forced stealth? After mildly enjoying the first one and never touching the second one for no reason in particular, this is the first time I actually believe the people who say that it's a shit sequel.
LoS2 is an amazing game in many ways
on paper, but fails at execution at so many aspects that it's one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. I really wanted to like it, as it improves on LoS1 on a number of things, but goes backwards in so many ways... and yeah the forced stealth sections are mega-annoying.
According to a review I watched eons ago it's something like Dracula transforms into a mouse and you have to scurry around invincible enemies who can one shot you.
More or less. At the start of the game I could kiiinda understand since Dracula just woke up from a long slumber and is weak/doesn't have his full powers yet blah blah... okay, sure. And honestly the rat transformation is not a bad mechanic. There's some decent puzzles/exploration section that involve the rat transformation mechanic, not just stealth sections, and they're not all bad, quite the contrary. I kinda enjoyed them, even.
But there are indeed invincible enemies, big guys in modern hi-tech armour that apparently are invulnerable to all your weapons/abilities including all your late-game powers, and their canons basically OHKO you, so each encounter with them is some sort of stealth puzzle mini-section, and while most are easy enough, some of them are rather annoying and not a single one of those encounters is remotely fun at all. It's pretty bullshit too especially since they remain invincible even after you regain all your powers. It'd have been at least satisfying to slaughter them a bit later on, but for some reason that never actually happens. It's just a big fat "why? who thought this was a good idea??".
The worst part is that this isn't even the most annoying aspect of that game. I could forgive this poor design choice if everything else was on point. But there's just so many little things about this game that are just this
particular level of annoying, as if the game really didn't want you to enjoy yourself. Like how there's a rather big Metroidvania-style gated world with power-ups scattered all around and you can come back later when you get the traversal abilities to reach them, but... there's very little in terms of map to orient yourself, or shortcuts to unlock, or fast travel, meaning it's an outright
chore to get back to wherever. Or how there's a room with various combat challenges, but you have to deal with an incessantly shrill voice talking to you constantly as you do it, because reasons. Or how that character with the annoying voice (the "Chupacabra") is a fairly useful vendor but really inconveniently placed, making visits to him excessively tedious. Or enemies respawn constantly and harass you as you try to get from point A to point B (like, for instance, going back to collect some power-ups...) and throw unavoidable projectiles at you as you try to climb away, knocking you down and interrupting you, forcing you into yet more repetitive combat encounters before pressing on. I just found myself constantly swearing at the game and it wasn't because it was too hard or anything.
It's so, so
grating. The combat is decent, the old castle looks stunning as always, the vampiric powers are neat and clever and remind me of Legacy of Kain which I adore, there's a decent atmosphere going on. But the execution is overall a shoddy mess, resulting in a frustrating game that falls very short of its potential. Oh and the final boss is super lame, too. It's a bummer, really.
That said, forced stealth is even more annoying in Gravity Rush 2 than in LoS2. The game is overall a better game, but holy fuck did those sections suuuuuuuck in GR2.