Candy Box 2
Adventures in the Realm of ASCII
Developed by a young French student, the first Candy Box hit a lot of game enthusiasts with its simple gameplay which mocked the grind-based RPG and social games while offering a nice and witty candy-filled experience.
The second episode builds on the critic success of the first one, but falls somewhat short. While it’s nice to have an almost open world to explore — opposed to the sequence of quest of its predecessor — Candy Box 2 feels somewhat lacking, and for sure less spontaneous.
There is a plethora of little stuff to find and collect in the world, but really none of this things convey the sense of surprise you could feel when unlocking something new in the first episode. It’s probably a bit less balanced timewise: the first episode did a great job in offering you something new right when you were almost bored, convincing you not to close the damn browser tab for another day or so. Here, instead, everything gets uninteresting pretty quickly, partly because some stuff is just the same (the lollipop farm, buying stuff, the cauldron).
I guess these games can only rely on the sense of novelty the first time you discover one of them, but all in all they get old quite quickly.
You can play CandyBox2 here:http://candybox2.net/
