Genuinely the worst sequel I have ever played. It's like going from a PC game to its mobile game spinoff.
Gameplay is full of weird friction and poor UI decisions. Informational icons are constantly being displayed without being defined; battle's the only place where you can mouse over them to see what they are, anywhere else they are completely without explanation, though sometimes you can back all the way out of the current interface into the Esc menu to go to an icon glossary... instead of just letting you mouse over the damn icon. Early on, starting a run entails pressing a forward button for twenty seconds, selecting the only available option from a list, then pressing the forward button for another twenty seconds as the execrable stagecoach rolls on through the emptiness, then pressing another button to be allowed to go through another interface, and so on; I can't overstate how much time you spend just staring at this stagecoach waiting for it to reach the next of what should just be back-to-back encounters. I don't think I've encountered a single intuitive menu interface in the whole game; sometimes navigation buttons are down left along the bottom, sometimes they're greyed out along the right, sometimes you have to click something in the middle. Want to look up a piece of information about your party members, like what their individual "hero goal" was again? There's a couple places to find it, but they're both buried in submenus. There's no consistency or predictability.
Narrative cohesion is nonexistent. The game starts by throwing you into an expedition for unknown reasons, with an artifact of unknown significance, in a world experiencing an apocalypse of unknown nature, with people who have apparently joined you by unknown means, on a quest with unknown goals; some of that is probably eventually addressed but I'm sure that some of it never is. Once everyone dies, you're back at the start doing it again without explanation or justification of any kind as to why it's possible for you to be back on the same mission with the same people who just died. Maybe they explain it eventually, but for hours there's just no hook to get the player interested in the world or motivated to do whatever it is that game wants you to be trying to do. The narrator was one of the cool things about the first game, but now he's a world champion vagueposter who exists only to make you sit and wait through extra dialogue between sessions while the stagecoach non-interactively rolls along.
Player agency is down the toilet. Instead of slowly strategizing how to carve out little avenues of advantage and advancement like in DD1, it's just an endless series of interchangeable consequence-free 'runs' full of "?" rooms. Initially there are exactly 4 characters unlocked for your 4 character slots, and they have exactly as many skills as they can equip, so there are no meaningful choices available. Character skill customizability is unlocked in infinitesimal trickles without a preview of what can be unlocked, so it takes many, many runs before you even have the tools to start making strategic choices about what you will predictably face. Abilities are full of restrictions like healing moves with "can only be used if target hp is below 33%", so you can't act proactively to address future problems, and even those abilities often have limited uses per combat; being able to act strategically in a game about strategic combat is apparently not part of the design. As if that wasn't enough, characters also have relationship-standing with each other that frequently degrades due to factors outside your control, so whether you end up in a viable situation or not feels like it came down to a crapshoot rather than tradeoffs you made. Between those factors, trinkets that do nothing at all unless you have other enabling items unlocked and available, random road encounters that you frequently have no means to scout beforehand, and so on, DD has evolved from a game about meticulous preparedness and risk assessment to a game where you might as well just throw up your hands and go next because the knowledge and tools to make meaningful decisions have been willfully withheld. Probably the most meaningful choice is how to spend the upgrade currency between runs and what characters to unlock new skills for, but you can't do those things strategically either because the details can't be previewed before being bought, so you're just guessing and hoping that _this_ hero path will be useful based on its description-- nope, better luck next time, have fun grinding out more upgrade currency to pull the slot machine lever again. Finally, I haven't played DD1 in a while, but this combat feels very RNG-oriented whereas I remember DD1 being more tactics focused. For me, in DD2, the outcome of most boss fights just comes down to whether the enemy gets a bunch of lucky successes on resisting ailments compared to their declared resistance percentage. If they don't, the fight goes easily. If they do, there's simply nothing to be done.
A lot of this feels like DD2 cribbed features from other successful games without even thinking about why they worked in their games of origin. It borrows the one-way-branching-dungeon format typical of games like Slay the Spire, but Slay the Spire's runs are made interesting by the way your loadout changes with every card you pick up; DD2 just has you using the same pathetic skill-kits through the same boring trash-mob fights every time, with the loadout only varying insofar as you get different trinkets. As for those trinkets, +20% bleed resistance isn't going to make yet another tedious run feel distinct, so the end result is that there's no enthusiasm to go through the same boring zone fighting the same boring enemies yet another time to grind candles and character unlocks in the hope of assembling a team with a functional strategy at some point. Similarly, in most such games, trivial encounters can be resolved quickly, but DD2 loves slow gritty grindy combat, so even when you're dramatically stronger than the current encounter it's a lengthy slog, punctuated by pointless 30-second stagecoach-navigation segments in which you clumsily swerve left and right to check for random items, a feature included just to make sure you can't look away and pay attention to something else during pointless stagecoach navigation segment #46. The 'give you a little more lore every time you lose' feature feels lifted from Hades, but Hades built its entire narrative structure around that conceit rather than just throwing it into a game in which, nominally, the characters die and the quest is a failure.
The art and animation styles are still on point but otherwise I genuinely have nothing good to say about this game. I had to check the developer page to make sure they don't have any other upcoming games that I should be aware to avoid.
