Darkest Dungeon® II

An unfortunately poor sequel. I should have listened to the reviews and avoided it, but I loved the first game and it looked interesting. They got me. Visuals in this are fine. I prefer the old 2D visuals, but that's probably just nostalgia. The new 3D visuals have less of the hand-drawn look, but are higher fidelity and allow smoother animation. Big-picture gameplay changes could be fine. The attempt to pivot to a rogue-lite could work, if it weren't for implementation. As it is, the game feels like a grind-fest. - Since a single run won't be more than a couple hours, if it gets off to a bad start, I'll just bail. The relationship system was an interesting idea, but if things start to go poorly, it spirals into all of the characters self-defeating through debuffs and mental breaks. So much for "making the best of a bad situation" when the gameplay encourages rerolling your start every time things go sideways. - One of the most memorable feelings from the first game was the despair that a party wipe could cause. The lack of long-term consequences in this one means character deaths lose impact. If I choose to continue, I'll just grab a new character at the inn. If I don't, I'll start back up with the same character as if nothing had happened. As for actually playing the game, well... I played on controller, which was a mistake. - Menu controls are inconsistent in the weirdest way. Every menu has its own particular control scheme for some reason. To see the next character in your lineup, you sometimes press LT/RT, sometimes LB/RB, sometimes left/right, or sometimes you have to back out of the menu you are in entirely. - Seeing the description of what an item, ability, or effect actually does (rather than just the name or icon) is turned off by default. The button to enable it changes between menus, and sometimes simply isn't available. - Using the stick to select an item in a menu is nearly impossible, as it will launch you to the other side of the screen if you press it in slightly the wrong direction. Beyond that, controls are frustrating in general. - Character abilities are locked outside of inns, meaning you can't change them between encounters. This would be fine, except... - Every new run you start, your character settings are forgotten and reset back to default. You can save lineups, but unless you do that every time, you will have to remember to go through the extremely fiddly process of selecting characters, selecting their "paths" (a submenu from the character menu, neither of which open automatically), and selecting their abilities. Miss anything, and you are stuck with the default abilities until you hit the next inn (or just restart the run, a multi-minute process in which you pilot the carriage and make no meaningful decisions). - Carriage control on the map feels awful. It crawls along at a snail's pace, swinging wildly side to side, getting stuck on the side guardrails. To make it worse, these controls are pointless, as you can't actually do anything to meaningfully impact the game while driving it. Navigation decisions are made at discrete points by choosing from a menu. Why manually drive it at all? I could go on, but the main takeaway is it feels bad to play this game. Not winning or losing, doing good or bad, but pressing buttons and trying to make choices in menus. It is a constant stream of low-impact and frustrating gameplay that you are forced to participate in, over and over because god forbid the game remember how you set something up before. Even if you memorize every menu's control scheme, every item's description, and are able to perfectly input around the clunky controls, it the gameplay doesn't make it feel like there's any reason to, as all sense of progression is gone, replaced with a simple grind for game currency. Finally, on the presentation: did you love the narration from the previous game? Well guess what, they heard that, and decided he should make some pithy comment every time you press a button. Get ready for an endless tirade of thesaurus-vomit for every second the game is open, because unless you turn all voice lines entirely off, he will be there. Honestly, making me dislike the fantastic voice work is the biggest sin this game could have committed. I'll just continue to play the first game, which holds up well.