Dragon Ruins II

I love the vibes and presentation, and looking at the rest of the reviews, there's obviously a demand for casual dungeon crawlers. Personally though, the fully automatic combat makes it all a bit, well... boring to me. The gameplay is nearly exclusively tuned around gauging how far into the dungeon you can make it without being wiped out while your party auto-resolves combat without any input from you, and it's just a bit too simplistic for my tastes. Lovely dungeon synth soundtrack and artstyle, though, and I don't regret paying the admission on that front!

First off, just wanted to say the top negative review is complete BS: enemies [b]do not[/b] scale with your party. Early game enemies will appear in later dungeons in large groups and they always do 1 point of damage and your weaker party members kill off 4-5 of them in a single attack. I almost wish they did scale because the game becomes overly braindead in the second half of the game and your dudes simply steamroll everything, no need to even shuffle injured members to the backrow and give them a ranged weapon like in the first half of the game. With that out of the way, might as well write an actual review. Dragon Ruins II is pretty fun, very casual and stripped down, certainly doesn't carry over the sadistic difficulty of classic Wizardry and its Japanese successors and that's probably for the best. The dungeons are the increasingly bigger mazes that you'd expect from a classic dungeon crawler with a few basic features like trap/damage tiles and teleporters. Treasure chests with underwhelming loot occasionally spawn in dead-end rooms and unlike Wizardry are trapped 0% of the time instead of 99% of the time. The game really leans on its look and feel, with a slightly blurry CRT monitor filter and dithered monochrome dungeon graphics, and character and monster graphics tastefully lifted from the public domain Javardry graphics set. The real standout effort is the music, which according to the credits was made entirely by the dev and is absolutely killer with flavors of retro RPG OSTs, 80s synthesizer-driven horror soundtracks a la John Carpenter, dungeon synth, atmospheric black metal, dark ambient, etc. Ridiculously good stuff, worth the price of admission on its own. Even though being stripped down is definitely the design intention, I couldn't help but feel that a bit more meat on the bones in terms of loot variety and meaningful equipment choices would have made things more satisfying. For example, choosing any armor type besides light armor or robes is shooting yourself in the foot because heavier armor tanks your agility while providing the same total defense value but shifted toward physical defense, while enemies that deal magic damage are frequent and usually hit harder anyway. There's an overall lack of refinement in the numbers that feel slapped together and not really balanced, so you kind of just pick the obvious best option and go with it. There are a couple of fun bits though, like choosing to upgrade a broken sword with useless attack power instead of throwing it away will eventually yield an overpowered enchanted sword after making some heavy gold investments. It might not blow you away in terms of deep engaging gameplay, but if the game's vibes even vaguely appeal to you I'd say go for it. It's an ideal Steam Deck game for killing 15-30 minutes.

I loved the 1st game, but this one takes what its predecessor did and amps EVERYTHING up exponentially. Well over a dozen maps and each one provides you with multiple quests and opportunities to build your party up before you reach the awesome, epic endgame. So much fun, man. This is, hands down, one of my all-time favorite Wizardry-like games.

Ate the game in a week. Just the right amount of simple and complex. It lives up perfectly as a "dungeon crawler for tired people". The devs actually get it.

Game of the year. Best game direction. Best narrative. Best art direction. Best score and music. Best audio design. Best independent game. Best action game. Best action / adventure. Best RPG.

It's way too simple, from a difficulty and mechanical viewpoint. Combat happens without any player input, quest chains on the same map with the objective in the exact same room. They didn't even bother to change the room... It looks pretty but there is absolutely no depth to this game. I don't understand what the point is and why people seemingly like it so much. There's not even a story here. You do quests, earn gold and XP, you buy stuff or level up and that's it. I expected more to be honest.

I'm surprised Dragon Ruins II changed the formula from Dragon Ruins I so drammatically. Quests, equips, different dungeon layouts, skills, merchant haggling and chests add so much to the whole "dungeon crawler for tired people" that takes the less out of the mindless. I didn't mind it, but if you came from the first title expecting more of the same, it's very different. Top notch atmosphere and I do like the new tilesets for dungeons, compared to the black canvas of the first, but at the same time those black canvas were very much reminiscent of old DOS games like Ultima or Wizardry, which is a shame. In short, mileage may vary from person to person. I enjoyed it immensely, but being it neither a full fledged dungeon crawler a-la etrian odyssey or wizardry, and neither a mindless scrolling game, it sits in an awkward middle. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, right?

....am I missing something here? This is borderline unplayable. 'Gameplay' involves almost zero player input - you just wander through a bunch of totally uninteresting environments (nondescript black and white halls with nothing at all to draw the eye) engaging in shallow, automatic combat lacking in feedback or the most basic mechanical substance. This game feels genuinely unfinished and I sincerely don't understand why people seem to like it so much. Can't remember the last time I bounced off a game so viscerally and so quickly. Refund please