Ok, here goes nothing:
My gripe is the power dynamics is comically one-sided: in this game PC can get brainwashed, mindcontrolled, mindwiped, TF'ed, brutally pounded, asphyxiated, trained, pleasured corrupted, and forced into marriage. PC can do none of these things back. Well, except (independently written) Milly.
My gripe is the corruption continues to be nothing that matters for anybody. I thought back then and still think now, with how poor and nothing corrupted hive is and how still nonexistent corrupted marefolk is. Why would anybody ever pick that? But i have to admit - dark dragonsblood is pretty good. Other corruption things? Meh.
Bear with me a millisec, lads & lassies, i'll try to elaborate. Looking ahead, I'll say: "Yes, i know about "not-my-power-fantasy" take". Yet still:
I'm this guys, who's all about good roots/endings for most games. When I played CoC1 this was my first playthrough. But the second one? CoC1 made it fun to be a corrupted hedonistic sexual behemot that dragged others down to your level with a corrupted sexual energy so radiant that even demons were blinded and, in the end of the day, bow before your line of thinking. Surely Fenoxo team doesn't have to copy corruption 1 to 1. And yet there's like 3 types of corruption in the game, there is all kinds of ways to lower your corruption, very good weapons that work with low corruption, and Ring of Fate that halves your corruption while locking you to at most 99, but! There's nothing really to corrupt you at all.
It can't be TF's as the TF capabilities in this game by nature of being streamlined require less use which corresponds to less corruption. We're not taking tons of TF's that cause corruption, we're taking a few and now we have our PC's appearance.
There aren't many events that would trade an action for corruption. There's nothing like the woods and deepwoods corrupted fauna. There are very, very few items that apply corruption and they're one time only. Additionally the corrupt items are generally…dull. Tarnished, if you will. Like comparing Swordsoul to Deflection or the helmet that requires very high corruption for, still at this point in the game, very middling defensive boosts. In CoC1 you could hang between mid-high corruption and ride the lightning of both worlds with a rather precarious balancing act which is absent here.
In this game the corrupt options overwhelmingly give a worse reward or simply locks me out of content.
There's all kinds of reasons to stay pure and negative reason to be corrupt.
Bear with me another millisec: this whole sheet of text is not about "hurr durr CoC1>CoC2", absolutely fсking not, CoC2 is good, i do like this game. It's all about the possibilities, the inner conflict so to say. What choice should I make if the other side offers nothing? It's like corruption exist somewhere in the background, almost without touching PC. There hasn't been a moment in this game where I would really think: maybe I should let this happen, corrupt him/her/them for this juicy bonus? There is no temptation.
Again, CoC2 is not a bad game, quite the contrary, and I wish the Fenoxo team every success. But you asked about my gripes - there it is.
