Which isn't to say, of course, that Gothic II is bad. It's just immensely frustrating. For everything that it does well, it does something else needlessly badly. It creates a living, breathing world full of interesting characters leading fascinating lives, and then hands the voiceover duties to a dozen or so autocue-reading dullards who sap the game of atmosphere with their uncomprehending, flat renditions. It shows you beautiful, magnificent vistas of rolling hills and ancient forests, and then lets you watch the framerate splutter and fail even on the highest of high-end machines. It depicts houses, trees and grasslands with loving detail, and then leaves the game's many hundreds of characters as twitching, clumsy marionettes. And its spellbinding, immersive atmosphere is all too often destroyed by great, galumphing, game-destroying bugs, including frequent crashes, missing dialogue, untranslated German text and even corrupted saved games.