Recent reviews by 0-4b

35 hours in, this game's pretty damn amazing, all things considered. The only complaint I've had thus far is the loss of layering clothing/armor, and more clothing items being restricted by vocation than in the original game. The combat is some of the most fun I've had in an ARPG in years, FromSoft aside.

I'm running the game with ray tracing and haven't noticed an FPS drop yet, so the performance woes are genuinely foreign to me. (I'm playing at 1080p on an RTX3060 with DLSS set to Quality and every other setting on High, so at higher resolutions your mileage may vary. I'm also running an i7 13700KF, so while my CPU's doing work it isn't necessarily struggling.)

Woes around those paid items ultimately boil down to preference. AFAIK, all of them are obtainable in-game, and at the same cost and through the same systems that they were attainable in Dragon's Dogma 1 - or faster in the case of Art of Metamorphosis, which seems to be one of the biggest gripes. These items are arguably less intrusive and restrictive than those of say, the Resident Evil remakes, more or less following the principal of giving the player the choice to spend a few dollars here and there to get some misc. items immediately.

The game does not support save scumming by design. You will have your most recent save, and a save file from the last time you've gone to sleep in game - beyond that, causality reigns; there's no such thing as "essential NPC's" like you might expect with a Bethesda game, everyone can die - but they can potentially be revived with Wakestones.

So while you won't have some of the more ubiquitous hand-holding most would expect from a modern RPG, if none of the above is a deal breaker then you can expect an absolute banger of an ARPG. For my tastes, the 70$ price tag beats the hell out of having to get a 4090 and an extra SSD just to spend 60+ hours modding Skyrim into the vague, bargain-bin approximation of what you'd get out of Dragon's Dogma 2, and while DD1 remains one of the GOATs, it's painfully dated by comparison.

TL;DR, DD2 is in my opinion a worthy successor and easily one of my favorite ARPG experiences to date. Heartily recommended.

There's a lot of negative reviews on here that don't seem to take into account that the game is indeed in Beta right now - not your typical pretend "We'll give you a head-start on the grind if you pre-order," but an actual beta. That said, I haven't encountered much in the way of instability; I've yet to crash, and I've maybe experienced a single disconnect from the lobby in thus far.

That said, the game is a blast. You'll get some of the best of Left 4 Dead, the best of Vermintide, and a beautiful amount of polish in terms of making weapons feel visceral without being over-powered. Gameplay thus far's been challenging, but nowhere near broken - just about what you'd expect playing as a normal human fighting somewhat less normal humans in the 40k universe. Progression isn't fully implemented yet though, so if you're looking to grind all the content you'll definitely wanna wait for the full release.

ONE OF US.

IT'S THE MOST INNOVATIVE SHOOTER I'VE PLAYED IN YEARS.