I would like to start this review by stating that I have 400 hours in DD1. I played an 80 hour Bloodmoon campaign directly before playing DD2 (for over 50 hours at time of review). I have beaten all 5 Act bosses, with multiple different teams, multiple different times, while having less than 50% of the unlocks when I did so.

I thoroughly enjoy both games for entirely different reasons, and I would not say one is better than the other. These are two different games. They have similar combat and share the same aesthetics, but the core gameplay loop is very different. If you enjoyed Darkest Dungeon, then you will probably find something about this game you like as well. It is 100% worth a try.

This review is for people who have read some of the negative reviews and are still on the fence.

TLDR; Game is very hard. Game is also very good. Me like game very much.

==== The Good ====

Visuals:
I was on the fence about the 3D models when I first played the early access version, they've since grown on me. Dripping in style and atmosphere. Love the aesthetics. Enemy designs are ridiculously cool. All the characters are oozing with personality. Animations feel weighty and impactful. No notes.

Sound:
Good ol' Wayne June can't go wrong. Not as iconic as the lines from DD1, but give it time. Soundtrack is phenomenal. In game sound effects are great as well. No notes.

Gameplay:
Difficult, stressful, but oddly satisfying. Different game play loop than DD1. I was hopping back and forth between both games over the last week and it felt like I was playing a different game each time. Scratches the same itch but with different time investments and expectations in each.

Combat is similar enough in both, but DD2 expands upon those ideas with the token system. I happen to like the token system very much, I don't know if I'd call it 'better' but I do think that it's more in-depth and interesting to engage with. More information is available to a player at a glance. However it is a lot to be presented with at once, which makes learning it more intimidating than DD1. Your mileage may vary.

==== The "Its Aight" ====

The Relationship system has gone through several iterations. I currently enjoy it where it's at now. You can get certain bonuses to various skills, buffs during combat, and even tag team attacks or defenses with positive relationships. The opposite for negative relationships. You can influence it in various ways, such as attacking the same enemy back to back, healing party members off deaths door, etc. It can be frustrating at times, but it's overall pretty easy to manage and even trivialize to a certain extent by using Inn Items to push relationships into the positive. If your party hates each other by the mountain, you're essentially going into the Darkest Dungeon with a fully afflicted party. It's going to be a bad time.

==== The Meh ====

Cant skip dialogue and cut-scenes you've already seen. Mildly annoying.

==== The Bad ====

For me the only real negative is the time it takes to unlock everything. Cut that time in half and I feel like it would be paced out much better. But I also was getting back to back successful runs very early on, which already makes things easier because I had more tools to play with. I don't dislike the unlock system, I just wish it didn't take nearly as long. Also would be nice if you could access The Alter at any time outside of a run.

==== Addressing Negative Reviews ====

I have read through a lot of the negative reviews of DD2, and I just wholeheartedly disagree with most of the complaints. I would like to break down some of those complaints and offer my own counterpoints to them.

I'm going to say the obvious here, but many of the complaints can be boiled down to "Skill Issue" and I don't mean that in the "Git Gud" kind of way. I genuinely mean that there seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding the mechanics / party composition. If your party is lacking in areas, you will struggle.

- Too RNG heavy

The game is no more RNG heavy/reliant than DD1 was. Full stop. In fact in a lot of ways it's less RNG heavy, because you can factor in tokens when making decisions rather than numbers. You know if an enemy has a crit token, you know if the enemy has a dodge token, these things don't happen randomly. Any attack you make will connect with the enemy barring any blind/dodge tokens. You have knowledge of turn order at the start of the turn. You can see most of what is ahead of you if you scout.

Good and Bad RNG happens in both games and in my experience the RNG in DD1 is far more punishing, because you have much less information to work off of.

While you can certainly make an argument that random Trinkets / Stage Coach items can influence your run, I've never had a run where I didn't find any useful trinkets. I'm not saying it can't happen, but I've yet to find it an issue in 50 hours of playtime. I have completed runs with bad trinkets. Its possible to complete a run with no trinkets at all.

In DD1, once you have all the best trinkets, there is very little reason to use anything else. DD2 forces you to make the best of what you find, which fits it's game play loop better. Whether you enjoy that or not is totally an individual preference.

- Planning runs isn't possible / required

Planning runs in DD2 is just as involved in DD1. You want to build a strong composition covering all your bases (tanking, healing, stress recovery, damage and dots). You want to know what bosses your build will be better against. For instance a combo team built around a Leper is going to have a much harder time with The Librarian or Sleeping General than they will the Leviathan.

I have beaten every DD2 end boss blind going in with strong all around team. I purposely switch out party members so I don't become reliant on any one character. Every character has their strengths and weaknesses.

- Stress doesn't matter / the affliction system was removed

First off, the affliction system is still present it's just different. Meltdowns replaced Afflictions and Resolute replaced Virtuous.

Stress matters a lot in DD2, I would go so far as to say that it matters even more than it did in DD1. The relationship system-- love it or hate it-- is an extension of the stress mechanic, It is *THE* most impactful system to having successful runs. If you let meltdowns happen and you start to have negative relationships, your run *will suffer* You not only get part of your kit disabled if it locks in a skill you did not want to use, it's even worse if a skill that you *DO* use starts handing out non-stop debuffs. Fortunately, the relationship system can be trivialized pretty easily by hard focusing it and always buying every single relationship boosting item. Good or bad, up to you to decide, personally I like the current iteration of relationships. But to say that stress is not important is just factually incorrect.

- Unlocks don't matter

Unlocks are all incredibly influential and go a long ways towards making runs easier overall. There's not much to be said here. Stronger characters, better path choices, better items. They also add variety. You don't need them to be successful, but they help and they are very impactful.

==== Conclusions ====

Ultimately if you don't like a game, then you don't like the game and that's fine. Some people will love it, some will prefer DD1 or DD2, and others will hate both games with a passion. If you enjoyed DD1, I think there's a lot of fun to be had with DD2. It offers a similar experience in a different package. I'd say give it a try, and if you really don't like it than you can always refund it.

The masochist in me absolutely adores both games for different reasons. I'm looking forward to the Kingdoms update, as I think that will add a ton to the DD2 experience and help bridge the gap between both games.

Game is very hard. Game is also very good. Me like game very much.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk

tl;dr Disappointing.
With such a uniquely intoxicating turn-based gameplay loop cultivated in Darkest Dungeon, you'd expect for Darkest Dungeon II to be a strictly improved change of convention; so to speak, out with the old, and in with the new.

Darkest Dungeon has always had a problem with the actual rogue-like elements of their game design. In Darkest Dungeon, you could, *by design,* play every single turn perfectly throughout a dungeon, and still lose miserably. It was a challenging game, and although this was frustrating, you grew accustomed to it because the game gave you just as many chances for disappointment during the gameplay loop as it did for pleasant surprise; for every catastrophic failure or negative meltdown outcome, there were just as many surprising and game-changing crits or item discoveries or positive meltdown outcomes that brought the game to some level of fairness. Unfair, yes, but not in a challenging way.

Darkest Dungeon II, from a first glance, attempts to be a microcosm of the original game's city-building and town management systems, while keeping the game constantly rolling along the progression path towards the action. A couple minutes on the road, a couple minutes in combat, during which you'd plan routes, manage character items and abilities, reassess combat strategies, so on.

In practice, however, DDII manages to overbloat every single aspect of the original game's philosophy of "fairly unfair." The mandatory 'Lair' fights oscillate between a cakewalk and not even worth the effort. Your characters can be randomly locked out of their best and most key abilities because of negative relationship developments on the road, whereas positive relationship developments will sometimes target the utmost useless skills for any given character, because the developers at Red Hook took the 'random' element of rogue-likes far too seriously.

When making a rogue-like, especially when making a turn-based, long term strategy based rogue-like such as Darkest Dungeon and DDII, it is impertinent that there is some sort of method to the madness.

When your tank falls out of line, you should at least be able to always depend on your healer, assuming they too are on the precipice of death, to keep them in the fight, or at least from keeling over dead at the nearest gust of wind.

When your party dies, you should at least see in retrospect what mistakes you made, what flaws in your approach or team design lead to the disaster in the first place.

When you lose, you should be disappointed, but still excited to start another fresh run and see what fortunes and misfortunes await your next gaggle of grim adventurers.

By removing the town-building and character management systems present in DD, Red Hook completely ostracised any idea of measurement and preparation that could be made before an adventure, all of which, just like the first game, hinge upon all four heroes playing their part in combat like a well oiled machine.
The front-line should tank hits and punish wind-up attacks, the back line should heal and provide buffs, and whoever's second from first rank should be able to cram as much damage into every shot as you can afford.

When the game throws in destabilising blows to your game flow, such as negative relationship developments, it expects for the player to be able to easily adapt, whilst simultaneously ignoring the fact that the various character "Paths" as well as innate team synergies can be completely dismantled with just one ability being removed from the turn rotation.
If the tank can't use his block ability, then the healers have to focus on either buffing the tank's damage or mitigating any that he would take; which means they can't buff whoever's in second rank or apply debuffs to the enemy, which means you're dealing poor damage or taking avoidable damage,which means you're taking more damage that your team cannot sustain or your tank cannot reliably block, which means...

The game digs its own grave with mechanics that undermine the sanctity of the gameplay loop it choose to curate. The majority of characters are very specifically geared towards a single task; with the exception of only the most straightforward archetypal characters getting unique class variants. But the more unique a class is, the easier it is for a negative relationship development to completely disrupt any semblance of synergy or coherence in their abilities. You could offset this by making each member of your team as much of a 'Jack-of-all-trades' as possible, but this sacrifices fluidity, effectiveness, and efficiency for a roster of 'adaptable' skills that will often get swapped out for an ability they can't make proper use of anyways. This isn't even to mention that, the more flexible a team composition is, the longer a run will take because of the inherently inefficient 'Wanderer' Path class design. This makes the already LUDICROUSLY long runs(upwards of two hours) take even longer, and they often still fail because the flexible versions of those classes have difficulty managing large amounts of damage, healing, and status management.

The game is unforgiving, that much is certain, but I would say 'challenging' is a title that would only befit a game that actually feels like you can earn a win through merit rather than blind luck. I have yet to complete a run that didn't feel like I walked into the final boss chamber and had it handed to me, and I have yet to lose a run I was close to winning that felt like it was lost due to miscalculation on my own part that brought about failure rather than a chance encounter or unlucky interaction or missing an important attack.
I wanted so badly to like this game, but it's just limp at the elbows and lacking the adaptibility this genre of video game is so widely known for. Very disappointing.

It feels like playing a budget version of DD1 mixed with a boring driving minigame and a frustrating dating simulator.