Recent reviews by Corpse Run Kid

Bodypillowism will live forever in the hearts of all that believe it.

I absolutely love this game. The bosses are a blast, and the game is just so fun.

Fun as hell tower defense game. Grindy though.

I gave up on friends after buying this game.

Solid game mechanically, the bosses are 90% straight garbage and 99% gank fights, so don't get it if you're excited for boss fights. Pretty solid weapon choice and exploration rewards as well. I'll never forgive it for its garbage tier boss design though.
7/10

It's... okay... the mechanics are fun enough but not really engaging... narration is okay but it grates after a while, the world design is small... was definitely overrated in its heyday.

This game's great. Get all your friends to buy it too, and have a blast.

I'm forever alone.

I HATE this game with a passion I've felt towards no other dark souls game. As a solo experience, NOTHING in gaming was so frustrating as my first playthrough of this entry. I'll probably be comparing DS2 to its contemporaries alot in this, but hey, what's a sequel to do?

First I do have a few Positives:

Combat is still dark souls:
The combat feels rhythmic as the others do in the series. Dodge hit, watch for patterns, repeat.

Amazing world design:
The world of majula feels fleshed out as a world. The game tunnels you into where you need to go in a less forceful way than dark souls 3 and i still feel like i'm actually making discoveries when i find the path to progress the story. And by god do some areas just outshine the entirety of anything else in the series. The shrine of amana in particular rivals even the visuals of arthouse-like games like ori and the blind forest in my mind, it's just absolutely stunning.


Customization:
My god. This has possibly the best mechanics in terms of equipment and weaponry of the three dark souls games. Everything feels unique to a degree that the first dark souls could only hope to achieve and Dark Souls 3 refused to strive for. Weapon infusion isn't necessary by any means, although mundane is recommended for all around builds, but weapons at least have differing movesets through the archetypes, and, unlike DS3, you can actually attack with your left hand weapon. then there's the addition of power stances. suddenly, when holding the two-hand button, two compatible weapons become a single fluid option with its own moveset. That's to say nothing of hexes, pyromancies, miracles, etc (that i will never give a second thought because 'melee or bust') which my compatriots tell me are the best in the series.

Now for the Negatives:

The Combat is Dark Souls but everyone's a snail armed with a pillow:
Everything has been slowed to an absolute crawl. Each hit a combatant takes is noticeably longer to go through than the other souls games, and the hits lack a crunch when they land, to the point that at times you don't even realize you've been hit. This is most notable in the bosses. Where something like the lost sinner would have been a formidable foe in the other souls games, she was a pushover to the highest degree due to her long windup times and recovery frames. I ended up beating this admittedly well set up boss in 2 tries, and i have a knack for being at the less flattering end of a bell curve for number of required tries in a boss fight. Every humanoid 1-1 boss ended up like this in DS2, they're simplistic and slow, so it's easy to predict their movements and react accordingly. Honestly, because of that fact, i would actually recommend DS2 as a starting point for learning how to fight humanoid bosses in the series, as they are 'baby's first duel' fights if not for the rest of the game because...

Dark souls 2 wants to kill you and it does not care how:
This fact is probably the most well known thing about DS2, and it's been hammered to death, but this game is cheap. As i said before, playing alone is the single most frustrating experience I've ever had in a video game. The first Bionicle PS2 game gave me less cancer than the way Dark Souls 2 attempts to live up to its predecessor. The black gulch, shrine of amana, and the iron keep, for how short they actually are, are permanently ingrained in my memory for the sheer amount of ranged enemies to keep you at bay combined with the gank squads of enemies that are there just to give you overload. Suicide bombers, archers, mages that deal half your health while you're wading through water, thin hallways with straight-line-attacking enemies you physically cannot get past without killing, this game hates fun in terms of enemy placement.

Your equipment hates you:
Weapon and armor degradation are extremely infuriating in this game. Your weaponry and armor have fairly low stability and there are multiple enemies that just degrade your equipment because 'screw you why not.' Especially in early game, it's actually recommended to have multiple weapons at the ready at all times because of it. Later game (outside of of a few areas that decide to throw equipment degrading enemies at you willy nilly dragon's aerie) this becomes less of an issue but still permeates the entirety of it to some degree.

Most bosses are bad:
The biggest issue with slogging through the terrible enemy placement is there's not a lot of payoff. As I've already said, the 1-1 knight fights are easy and predictable, but the rest of the bosses don't fare much better. I believe i found a total of ONE fight to be particularly enjoyable in the main story: the smelter demon, his attacks hit faster than most bosses but have longer recovery frames, and i felt like i was on my toes for the entirety of the fight. Because of this, i actually consider this a good starting place to learn how to fight bosses in dark souls if you could find a bosses only mod. However, there's a major issue with even that. It seems FromSoft saw the success of ornstein and smough as being such a 'great' fight that the idea behind them is used as a crutch for a more than necessary amount of late game bosses. You beat dragonrider without breaking a sweat? Cool, he's a miniboss enemy for a bit, but you also have a new boss to fight; TWO DRAGONRIDERS. AND ONE'S A RANGED ENEMY. SO FUN. Now you get to try to roll the dice for when they cycle patterns and when you can actually attack because they forgot that environment is what made ornstein and smough even bearable. Gank boss arenas in dark souls 2 come in two flavors: small and flat where it's melt or be melted (a la two dragonriders), or big and flat where you're just running around hoping the enemies split themselves up by some act of god (a la throne watcher/defender). Then you have beast bosses, which are... disappointing. one boss constantly heals in her arena which slowly kills you unless you know to burn a specific thing in the map, another is just quaelaag but with homing soulmass and a tail, one's a giant spider you can literally beat by mindlessly circling it with a torch in your offhand and getting a few hits in every so often, and so on and so on and so on. These bosses suffer from poor design and my enjoyment of the game suffers as a result.

DLC:
Imagine if you took the base game and asked: how do we make this even less fun? You have the DLC. Play at your own risk.

Conclusion:
If you can stand the infuriating... actual game in the name of customization, this is definitely a game I can recommend to you. Furthermore, as most dark souls games are, DS2 is definitely an enjoyable experience with friends. Issues 2 and 3, outside of pre-soapstone, are almost completely erased when you have friends along, and even some portions of issue 4, namely the idea of 'hey, let's just lets try and make lightning strike twice with significantly worse iterations of ornstein and smough' become more mitigated through this method, so I can wholeheartedly recommend this as a fun multiplayer game. If you're playing alone though, avoid this entry like the undead curse.

It's Mark of the Ninja but technically better. Original was a fun time, thus this one is too.