Darkest Dungeon® II

It lacks the charm of the first one with its persistent home base aspect, while solving the first one's problem with a party wipe of your best characters snowballing into the run being a lost cause. I want the charm and continuity of the first one back and hope they try other ideas for how to solve the maintainability problem. But this has been a worthwhile sequel in terms of pure gameplay, even if I'm not a fan of the meta structure.

If Darkest Dungeon 1 is C&B torture, Darkest Dungeon 2 is C&B torture but the Mistress doesn't even pretend to like you.

As a big Darkest Dungeon fan (over 350+ hrs played), I've tried several times over a few years to get into this sequel and enjoy it for what it was. This sequel made several choices to evolve & differrentiate this from the original game. Nearly all of those choices not only fell flat but actually detracted from what fans loved about the original. What I miss the most is progressively building a town and crawling through actual dungeons. Instead, this sequel abandoned those aspects to emulate Slay the Spire's roguelite gameplay. Don't get it twisted: I love Slay the Spire. But it doesn't work here. And forcing the most infuriating vehicle driving controls I've ever personally experienced in a video game? Disastrous. Every time I return to this game hoping that I've not given it a real chance, I get bored after several hours. And I realize after nearly a dozen attempts to give this sequel a chance across 150 hours, that I only ever returned because of appreciation & nostalgia for the original. This sequel stands uniquely as the only game that's actually wasted my time. A true disappointment. And an abject failure.

This game should be called as Darkest Road or samething. In this game you play as a horse(s) - who are dragging the stagecoach through the doomed road. From time to time you get random passengers who try to save the world and at the end - even if they save the world. You - the horse(s) are still doomed to repeat this damn thing... Atleast you get same cosmetic upgrades for you stagecoach, but no upgrades for horses who are most important thing in this whole game. Because: no horses > no horse power > no traveling stagecoach for passengers who want to try save the world. Horses needs more love.

真的不能给推荐，太TM气人了，开始看评论，觉得能有多恶心呢？一玩确实恶心....打俩小时然后被山上大眼球直接干回来白打... 一路碾压觉得大局在握，万事俱备，结果BOSS一回合攻击好几次我都没明白什么机制，+75%生命90血的老兵，70血66%伤害的麻风...3回合都扛不住，玩卵啊....而且能不能给个重新战斗啊？你要知道这小怪要打2个小时啊........你把挑战难度放在通关后好不好，还没通关就劝退多少人啊，2小时白打谁能有心情玩。恶意与玩家为敌还想要好评？？？？

most negative reviews come from people expecting the original game. This game is drastically different from the original, so be aware before buy. it changes and reworks a ton of mechanics from the original creating a completely new flavor of darkest dungeon. I personally found this one to be not as good as the original, but still very fun.

Во всех отношениях уступает первой части. Никакого ощущения безысходности, опустошённости и предзнаменований таящегося в темноте ужаса. DD2 неспособна (за редким исключением) вызвать эмоции, но и на статус убивалки времени тоже не тянет, поскольку требует завидного терпения и минимум пол-литра на столе (чтобы поддерживать себя в тонусе и освоить трансцендентальные способы восприятия информации). [i]— Как в тебя играть? Как в тебя играть?!! — НЕ НАДО В МЕНЯ ИГРАТЬ!!1[/i] Это явное инди, не сумевшее оторваться от земли, в отличие от своей предшественницы. Но если отойти от сравнений, это попросту неграмотно склеенная игра. ⚜️ крайне недружелюбный интерфейс — боль не только для игрока, но и для дизайнеров с профдеформацией. Чтобы жизнь мёдом не казалась, видимо. Ну или чтобы превратить игровой процесс в симулятор энциклопедиста, который водит пальцем по очередному всплывающему окошку в попытках запомнить значение каждого символа ⚜️ изменения в визуальном стиле — не думала, что глаза способны болеть от статичной картинки, но вот такой эффект на себе наблюдаю. Отдельные элементы нарисованы симпатично, а всё вкупе смотрится перегруженно ⚜️ тягомотина с загрузками экранов везде и всюду; и сто лет в обед никому не упёршаяся карета. Я хочу как можно скорее переходить от битвы к битве, для чего игре такого жанра перебивки на неспешную ездовую прогулку? Как это обогащает геймплей? Каким образом позволяет глубже проникнуться происходящим? Многозначительное многоточие… ⚜️ помните, как вы глубоко дышали и медленно смыкали веки, восстанавливая внутренние ритмы, чтобы смириться с потерей весталки, которую старались оберегать, как хрустальную вазу, и аккуратно вели до 6 уровня? Вот и я помню. Но как что-то призрачное и далёкое, будто из прошлой жизни ⚜️ отсутствие строительного менеджмента — как следствие, игра лишилась созерцательных перекуров, во время которых можно было перевести дух, остудить разум, отойти от последствий своих ошибок и, пусть и минималистично, «побродить» по нашему временному пристанищу ⚜️ персонажи, которые дуются друг на друга по любому поводу. Интересная механика, но никаких параллелей с реальной жизнью, в связи с чем я, как игрок, просто не верю и переполняюсь раздражением ⚜️ музыка и воспоминания героев — то немногое хорошее, что игра в себе содержит. И эта галочка легко закрывается скоростным прохождением на Ютубе Рекомендую тем нетребовательным, кто влюблен в стилистику DD и готов её поглощать под любым соусом. Остальным советую лечь на обратный курс, благо первая часть до поры до времени очень даже реиграбельна.

Даже незнаю что сказать, после первой части которая мне понравилось, но в которую интерес играть у меня почему то пропал, я думал что дд2 это продолжения где все тоже самое, но банально лучше. Облом! Начнем с того что в игре полностью отсутствует мененджет чего ли бо! Нельзя продавать, можно только покупать предметы сомнительного назначения, нельзя улучшать героев в привычном понимании, то есть через ап лвл и подъем базовых статистик как например урон, здоровье и прочее, теперь герой с которым ты прошел огонь и воду практически нечем не будет отличаться от того же героя которого ты только что нанял. Дратьса перестало быть интересным, потому что за это не дают опыта, а дают предметы и деньги, первое практически всегда кал, а если и не кал то, нужны исключительно для ультра потных людей которые высчитывают каждый процент в надежде собрать чуть ли не камни бесконечности и стать Таносом, а второе нужно для покупки предметов, предметы ничего из себя полезного не представляют, на что то полезное тратиться другая валюта, и другая валюта редкая и ее чуть ли не постоянно не хватает. Вообще начать мне стоило с того что это уже рогалик, и называть игру таким же названием как и предыдущую часть мне кажется подставой. Вместо исследования данжов, ты едешь на карете и на пути у тебя встают всякие преграды, ничего общего с разветвленными данжами из дд1 нет, ДА ТУТ КАРТА ИЗ SLAY THE SPIRE БУКВАЛЬНО! Ваши ожидания, ваши проблемы. (с) Аршавин

I cannot in good faith recommend this game, even if you somehow manage to forget that the first one exists. *The (little) good* - Art-wise, character design is excellent. It's good to see the familiar characters brought to life in 3D *The (sorta) mixed* - Soundtrack is good, but very sparse, repeating a lot between locations. You'll become sick and tired of hearing the same combat music - The narrator is still excellent as a VA, but his lines are much, much weaker than the ones from DD1 - Story starts ok, but loses steam fast due to... - The repetitive nature of doing runs over and over again. You'll have a brief, unsatisfying blurb at the start of the run that doesn't advance the story until you actually complete your "level" - The huge focus on combat. You either like it or don't play the game (will be expanded further ahead). - True to a rogue-lite design, you have permanent unlocks with candles, which you collect by doing run milestones and side-objectives, but what you can unlock is a mixed bag. *The (whole lotta) bad* - The combat feels less random at first, with unmodified hit chances starting at 100%. But you'll soon realize that crits are still king (and still RNG) and that the ridiculous overabundance of tokens means that the combat will still feel RNG despite what I previously wrote - Enemies are stacked to gills with random effects, especially DOTs. Almost every single enemy move has a DOT, gives them a positive token or gives your guys a negative token. And if they don't, they only just cause a huge amount of damage. - Tokens are basically buffs or debuffs that alter damage dealt/taken, give guaranteed crit or reduce chance to hit via blind/dodge (sounding a lot more RNG now, uh?). There's so many, that they literally had to put a cheat sheet for you to consult at anytime. They "reduced" RNG only to slap it back with a bunch of icons under the characters - You sometimes get battle modifiers. Just 'cause. With no warning or way to prevent them other than literally turning them off pre-run. They can range from benign (rarely), to ♥♥♥♥ that just exists to be annoying (like giving a guaranteed crit to the last character acting in a turn, and making you face two of the slowest enemies in the game, who can act twice) trending towards the latter. - The relationship system is a mess. The positives will rarely be useful (when character A uses this useless ability, backliner character B will be healed of DOTs, which they are rarely targeted as) but the negatives will guarantee you a restart from how punishing they are (like giving dangerous debuff tokens on abilities you use a lot or even backstabbing eachother mid-attack). And once a relationship is negative, the game is pretty much designed to keep it that way, encouraging a restart. - You can't have duplicates in a party, and if a character dies, they're gone for the rest of the run. Meaning that well-designed, maybe niche or experimental parties are usually a detriment when compared to tried and tested parties. 4 Crusaders? 4 Lepers? Actually good in DD1, an impossibility here. - The candle system sounds like a staple for a rogue-lite game, right? Until you realize that they've locked actual stats behind candles. The difference in the resistances of characters in a new save and a complete one is gigantic. You aren't improving, you're un-gimping yourself to the point where characters have roughly their DD1 resistances at full power. - But that's not all, characters have to be unlocked with candles (meh, that's quick enough) and then you have to bring them in runs to unlock SKILLS. In DD1, you simply chose what skills you wanted in a brand new character, here you have to basically do suicide runs, rushing shrines at the detriment of everything else, just to unlock SKILLS, some of them VITAL. The Flagellant (who got reskinned into Blight, for some unexplained reason - Bleed is actually very rare for your characters to inflict now) is barely functional with his locked skills ("More, More!" and "Sepsis") The Man-At-Arms literally doesn't start with his iconic Riposte ability. Occultist can barely use his empowered abilities without a locked skill that gives him special tokens per turn. - Stress is still punishing but has been simplified to only 10 "Stress Points", while stress healing is much harder to come by. If things go your way, good relationships and fruits will reduce them, but if you have bad relationships and were stupid enough to not bring one of the few stress relievers, that's basically a restart. Why? Because hitting the max stress threshold doesn't cause a random affliction like in DD1, it's a tossup between a random Virtue (rare as usual) or a Meltdown, which causes a huge relationship loss, gives debuffs and deals a chunk of damage - basically a DD1 affliction + Heart Attack baked together. Flagellant gets Toxic instead (God, even the name is lame when compared to DD1's "Rapturous") which buffs him but still causes the relationship breakdown (starting the domino effect of a lost run) - Enemies are overloaded with DOT abilities, even if some of them don't even make sense (Cardinal creates a "black hole" that inflicts Bleed, Blight and Burn at the same time. Why? Dunno, because ♥♥♥♥ you, here's artificial difficulty) - Trinkets need to be unlocked with candles before they start to actually show up for buying. But Trinkets have tiers now, with early ones either being pure RNG trash (15% chance to blind the enemy or 15% chance to give them a guaranteed crit token) or boring but important resistances with downsides (+20% Bleed Resist with -10% Burn Resist), with the top tier ones basically conferring bonus with no downsides (+66% Bleed Resistance). But here's the catch: the more Trinkets you unlock, the more you dilute the Trinket table with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ones, becoming harder to find the worthwhile ones. And unlocking Trinkets is purely random. - Another candle mechanic, the memory system, is completely useless. Basically, if a character survives a run, you may spend candles to keep their Quirks and other bonus for subsequent runs, but if they die, everything is gone. In a game specifically designed around repetition via loss, surely I don't have to explain why this system is not well thought out. At this point I'm just ranting. Look, I didn't expect DD1 verbatim, but this game feels packed with mechanisms and artificial difficulty designed to keep players playing in a repetitive cycle, at least until they finally unlock everything and are in an equal playing field. And they locked the Crusader, literally one of the two characters you start the previous game with, behind a paywall. I just can't endorse a game like that.