You’re invited to enter a magical new world featuring portals and oxygenation! ‘Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart’ is a single-player, fantasy, action survival game with a focus on crafting and travelling via portals to different mystical worlds. Developed by Tbjbu2 and published in collaboration with GrabTheGames, Grand Emprise 2 is the sequel to ‘Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival’. Both games are currently available on PC/Steam.

Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart is a fantasy simulation game that focuses heavily on crafting and surviving. Your main focus as the player is to traverse the world via portals whilst utilising resources around you to fight and survive. Once you take your first steps into this expansive world, you will be faced with vast natural landscapes, creative worldscapes and an array of orc and ogre enemies to fight. You will also encounter a unique in-game mechanic referred to as ‘oxygenation’.

This interesting mechanism allows the player to collect oxygen-rich flowers that further travel through areas with low oxygen levels. Although this mechanic is unique, the game does a poor job of explaining what the oxygenation mechanic means or where it’s applicable. However, upon mastering oxygenation, you’ll find the game opens up for you significantly. You simply cannot sufficiently explore Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart without carrying oxygenation flowers on your person.

Upon starting Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart, the player is immediately transported through a magical warp system reminiscent of No Man’s Sky’s hyperdrive travel system. This warping happens every time you load into the game.

Unfortunately, in the case of Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart, the audio and video during warp is much choppier than its successful counterpart. After your initial game-starting warp, you’ll find yourself in an open area surrounded by a seemingly ancient landscape.

Your task? Find the portal so you can visit other worlds. Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart offers 3 difficulty levels to play with, ranging from very easy to easy to normal. It’s important to note that you will lose your inventory upon death if you pick any difficulty besides ‘very easy’. And no, you cannot customise your character creation before or during gameplay.

After finding and entering your first portal, you will be tasked with gathering resources and crafting basic tools to help you progress further. Oh, and before you craft tools for gathering and crafting purposes, don’t forget to punch nature for resources! You’ll quickly find that the in-game tech tree is a necessary feature for game progression, too. Open the tech tree by pressing G to see which current objectives are active.

The tech tree itself is extremely minimal and visually lacklustre, and you will be seeing it often during exploration. Thankfully, as you progress and upgrade, you will have access to things such as gliders or subterranean submarines to investigate the main biomes more thoroughly. Whilst exploring, you’ll face several goblinesque enemies alongside the occasional boss fight.

Unfortunately, the in-game combat leaves much to be desired. I found the enemy fights to be simple, repetitive and ultimately unsatisfying. I also didn’t like how enemies camp around your loot upon your character dying, because once you respawn, you’re immediately faced with an enemy fight immediately.

Boss fights are slow and underwhelming. The first boss fight I did was set in a visually appealing ancient temple, but the combat itself was almost comical. I’d rather freely explore the game without the awkward enemy combat.

Visually, Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart itself feels quite dated. 3D environmental visuals and a lack of depth are some faults that come to mind. The best way to gain satisfaction from the overall visuals is to employ a vivid imagination. I found some of the worlds in-game to have great concepts and a storied idea behind them, but overall, they were very one-dimensional and made for the player to exist there for only a short time.

What Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart lacks in visual impact, storytelling, character customisation and satisfying enemy combat, it does not lack in ambience. Partially due to the fact that the game itself is undercooked, but also due to the atmospheric soundtrack. The music played in-game is reminiscent of many fantasy adventure games, and it feels perfect for this style of game.

So after spending many hours playing this game and then reading user reviews online, I feel confident in saying Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart is not worth your time or money, not unless you finished Grand Emprise 2: Time Travel Survival or are somebody who naturally possesses a morbid curiosity.

Written by: Nattia Jones