Darkest Dungeon® II Reviews

Rest in peace Wayne June, a true legend- both DD1 and 2 are worth solely for his narration skills and how well the fit the gameplay loop o7

It was bit sketchy at release especially compared to the first game, but with kingdoms free mode, im really enjoying it, gives a board game esk feel and sense of permanance a little like feel of xcom2, even if gameplay is very different

Great game, story-telling, and lore. Very cool characters and enjoyable turn based gameplay.

Well worth the price, overall, but I'd like to say Kingdoms has been more pain and frustration than I can even put into words. As a seasoned DD1 and DD2 vet I can say I HATE Kingdoms. I have many hours on it and so far it's been both the most fun I've had and the least. The way they have it balanced you can be playing an absolutely perfect game, literally steamrolling the map to the point where it's boring, and then get literally wiped in one combat. How? I can give three examples, involving lair bosses (library, leviathan, baby) that for whatever reason were exponentially stronger than my completely maxxed out team. I'd highly recommend ignoring lair bosses in Kingdoms simply because they absolutely destroy. There's nothing like wasting 12 hours slogging around doing the same boring combats using the same tired group dynamics that 1000% work only to just lose to suddenly cheating AI that resists 100% of everything and super-crits every attack. See, in Kingdoms you fight way more battles than in classic. That's just the design. Pick your 4 most OP heroes, max out their mastery and stats, relationships, and demolish. Over and over and over, this repeats, until the stars finally align perfectly and you run into a bad run of "rng" on a particular fight, where the mobs can't miss regardless of dodges and blinds. Lose your team on a boss fight that you'd normally win, and kiss hours goodbye. After 10 failed runs that were going very well to the point of boredom this has happened consistently. The only reason I'm playing at this point is to win and perma shelve this game. So yes, the most fun I've had in DD2 punctuated by absolute scathing anger and resentment and feelings of time wasted. Relationships are key to winning in Kingdoms. Max those, the game plays itself. You'll still lose if you fight a boss, (you can't run on bosses) but skip bosses, max relationships and just win. I can't skip all bosses, it's not in my DNA. General is still easy as pie, but the others are just broken in Kingdoms. My last baby fight I hit the baby with damage a whopping 3 times in the entire fight. This was with 2 blinders in the group. The poops never missed, my party moved around out of position, blight stuck on me in spite of very high resistance, and the baby critted 95% of it's attacks including the little ones. I might as well have been a new team with no trinkets, but I was maxxed on everything. I went in through the first two prelim fights taking zero damage and then just blammo. #$@%$# Never post angry.

Don't buy this game expecting it to be like the first. It isn't, and that's okay because it excels at being it's own game.

It is vastly different from Darkest Dungeon 1 and personally I think that is fine. The second game decided to go in a more arcade-y kind of direction. The problem creeps in that it tries to keep the difficulty of the first game without keeping any of the buildup its predecessor had. You are going to get trashed on 20-30 times in a row before you unlock other characters and unlock the various abilities of the characters you do have. You are going to get trashed on another 20-30 times before you manage to beat the first act. Even with the easy mode torch, The game is hard. You can not retreat from battle once started, so if a fight doesn't go your way, the run is over. The moment you lose one person, you might as well restart. It is not a game about making the best of a bad situation, it's a game of either perfection or a desperate race for scraps. Losing one person drastically reduces your chances of survival as that is less damage you can output in each fight and less damage you can take. Then, even if you manage to make it to the end of the region, if you spent more than 2 skill points on that character, you lose the difference, and the next character you bring in starts off with everyone disliking them. Every time a run ends, the characters completely reset, except for new abilities unlocked at the shrine, and memories for surviving characters. Having to unlock the abilities of the characters leads to a very nice storytelling element that encourages you to grow attached to the character.... until they die in the next fight because they whiffed 3 50% chances to hit and failed their 67% deathblow resistance because chance based stats are all this game knows. Do not enter the spider den. It has several ideas for how you can put together teams that it seems to want to set up, but has no idea how to do so. Bleed is a great example, as the Hellion, the Highwayman, the Plague Doctor, and the Jester (until recently) all have Bleed paths. The Hellion requires being in one of the front three positions, The Highwayman requires the same slots, The Plague Doctor the same, and The Jester the middle two slots. See a problem? The Hellion gets an ability that increases damage vs bleeding targets and gives her execution 1 vs bleeding targets. Her bleed skills aren't her high damage skills, so you either use a turn to increase your damage minorly, that you could use to add more bleed, or use that turn to increase your damage moderately, while dropping all future bleed damage and losing said buff after 3 turns if you don't use a bleed attack (wasting the buff for said attack) to reapply bleed. Oh! and Execution 1 vs bleed is worthless as she never can target multiple people (with an attack that would actually do damage and thus trigger this) and therefore the Highwayman shows her up with a constant Execution 1 on two different abilities. So each time you have an idea for a interesting group that works together, you end up finding out that they either require the same spots, one of them does it so much better than the others, or (For some God forsaken reason) they are self deleting. Hellion! Let's give her a path that gives her 3 bleed at the start of her turn 25% of the time! That seems like it would lead to a sense of a hard hitting character that pushes themselves to the limit! Whoa! Turn 3, she has 12 bleed, and her life is only at 26 (assuming she hasn't been hit once despite sitting in slot 1) because you failed the d4 roll 3 times! How unlucky you! Jester! Let's give you an ability that gives your support moves even more oomph but gives bleed to the allies as well! Oh no! Now the stress heal (before the recent change, after the change is even worse! how often is 1 stress heal helpful, and how often is your allies at 5+ stress and bleeding?) is hard to use because the reason they were stressed was because they were hit by a crit and have been bouncing on and off death's door and if you try to stress heal them, the bleed might kill them! Furthermore, the Plague doctor can't keep up with your bleed on top of the bleed from the enemy, and any buff you give feels like it would have been more useful in the weaker form to fix squad positioning or if you just swung at one of the enemies. Occultist! Here's a path that has a 33% chance to increase the damage from the next hit by 50%, Here's a path that turns you into a glass cannon by reducing your already small health pool by 20% and gives you a 33% chance to gain a buff that two of unlock really potent abilities, but each buff adds a 33% chance to give you 1 burn at the start of your turn. Because the 20% reduction in health and the 50% chance to roll a 0 on your heal with another 50% chance for 3 bleed on the target wasn't enough. Runaway! Would you like the exact same scenario as the Hellion, only instead of bleed it's burn? At least you have a better chance of resisting it. No? Well how about an option that raises your damage to support character level, but completely destroys your burn damage potential? "What am I useful for then?" Huh. Good question. Anyways... Vestal! On this path, you need to be hit to be able to power up your abilities. Also, you have no taunt like features, and can only guard a single person. Duelist! We swear that your stances change and do different effects depending on the path you take. No, you have no in-game way of checking what each path does for your stances until you enter the round and apply the stance. Crusader! You have an entire path based on Burn, and are the second character that has more than one ability that applies burn. You have two. You also have a path based on protecting allies and regenerating health. Maybe if your abilities had more regen, health, or damage reduction, you wouldn't be almost dead from taking 3 strikes to the face. The way the game is set up, it feels like the characters are less a team, and more a group of individuals working together. Combo is supposed to help with this, but instead it constantly gets used up on a +20% Blight Pen instead of a +50% DMG for the damage dealers or ignoring blindness for the Leper. It feels like every character has a way to use combo, and most of them are terrible. So you have to waste turns not doing the most effective move, or use the combo up and waste potential for the ones who use it well. Furthermore, it is annoying to set up combo. Most abilities that apply combo either apply it to hard to use slots, have a low chance of applying it, do little to no damage while applying it, or some combo of the three. I could use Highwayman's Tracking Shot to apply combo, and then use a +50% DMG buff on a different character for about 16 dmg, or I could have him and the other character attack for 8 and 10 to deal a total of 18. Hmmm. So, because combo is so hard to use, you end up in a spot where maybe you pick two characters for some synergy, and the others fill a role. You need a healer so you grab Occultist, Plague Doctor, or Vestal. doesn't really matter which. You need a Tank so you grab Flagellent or Man-at-arms. Then you find the cheese and realize what the game is balanced around. Grab the Shambler pet and never use any other again. It makes the special trinkets only need one slot instead of two. Trinkets that are supposed to be so powerful that it needs both a weak trinket and a downside. +75% health, -50% DMG. +100% DMG, -30% per turn. 50% Chance of a second turn, 50% chance of 1 DMG. These trinkets make the game start to feel like it is more preparation instead of chance. Oh, and I'm kinda sick of being told that I'm an awful person for the 100th time in a slow intro every single time I reset again after losing a run. This game needs a fast forward or skip button if it really wants to keep the arcade-y feel.

The game is great. Storytelling, art style, and combat are all the traditional Darkest Dungeon style. There are major differences however, if you played Darkest Dungeon for the strategy side, then the original Confession mode won't be for you, the new Kingdoms mode is much more classic Darkest Dungeon. There are some issues in the original Confession mode. Due to the fact that you couldn't switch heroes (other than getting to swap in the bounty hunter for one region) and every run involving at least 1 region boss and the Confessions themselves, party diversity is limited for inexperienced players. It can be overcome with planning and skill but it is a legitimate negative. The new Kingdoms mode encourages hero swapping and party diversity and has a strategic macro game. It's essentially a lite Darkest Dungeon 3. I'm sad the devs felt they needed to release this game mode for free and I'm hoping further Kingdom campaigns are DLC so I can continue to support Red Hook and their amazing Lovecraftian horror games. To address the fact that this game's overall reviews is currently "Mixed". A large number of reviews boil down to "I wanted a copy paste of Darkest Dungeon 1". Some of the reviews do focus on the issues that are present in Darkest Dungeon 2, but most of them are complaining that it's not like the first game. Darkest Dungeon 1 still exists and it's still amazing. Red Hook didn't take the servers down and you can never play it again. If you want Darkest Dungeon 1, download some mods, go play DD1 and stop review bombing a game because it's not like a completely different game. This game was not advertised as a copy of DD1, it was extremely public that it was going in a different direction. Don't ignore negative reviews, as there are things that might not be for you, but examine all the reviews very critically as a lot them are negative for reasons that aren't valid.

Beautiful design, both in individual combats and artistically. Possibly The Best voice acting(rest in peace Wayne June). Game is not fun, It's repetitive and you can't skip over or speed up the repetition. The meta progression is mostly non-existent, the characters are disposed of every run. Then, when you use them in the next run, the information you need about your randomly rolled new character is hidden behind clunky menu interfaces: first, bringing up a separate character list from the character list you are shown, then cycling to rather than clicking on the character you'd like to view, then flipping to a different tab to access traits, then flipping to a 3rd tab to access character quests. Also, even though you can, don't bother reordering your abilities, they'll reset every run, so just lean into the default order, it's just easier. If you're looking for the gravitas of whether to load up on more loot when your party inventory is full, or if you should hold onto food and torches to protect your characters, there's none of that here. There is only stuff you need right now and stuff you don't. If you don't, you don't, you throw it away and it never mattered that you got it in the first place. Which is what everything sort of feels like.

RIP Wayne June. Time is a slow and insidious killer. Game is fantastic, much like the first game, it bears the singular talent that is Wayne June as the narrator. This game is different from there out though. If you are looking for exactly DD1, this isn't it. But it is a great game.

If you are concerned about the negative reviews on this game, it is imperative you ignore every and all negative reviews comparing this game to Darkest Dungeon 1. This game is not a "remake" of DD1. They didn't "take away features". Red Hook have made it abundantly clear that Darkest Dungeon 2 is it's own game and while it has the same art style and battle system of the first game (thus why it's called Darkest Dungeon 2 and not something else like other reviews say it should be) it should be viewed as it's own experience rather then compared to a almost totally different game. I have hundreds of hours in both games and I love them both dearly for their own merits. If you prefer DD1's long campaign and are not a fan of DD2's rougelike confessions mode or the shorter campaign in kingdoms mode. That's totally fine! DD1 isn't going anywhere and you can go and play that right now. But just because you prefer how DD1 did things, it doesn't make DD2 a bad game. It just means you prefer DD1's gameplay loop. The last thing Red Hook wanted to do when making DD2 was make DD1 obsolete so they tried their hardest in not making Darkest Dungeon 2 just more of Darkest Dungeon 1. This is the key thing you need to realise when getting into DD2 when you're a long time DD1 player. Sadly because of the recent negative reviews I felt like I needed to go on this long rant but I will quickly gush a little about this game for people who are completely new to the series and want to give this game a try. Darkest Dungeon 2 is a wonderful experience I would strongly recommended to any turn based RPG fan, especially if you're looking for something a little tougher since this game does not pull any punches. The art style is beautiful gothic horror and despite the dreary look, the game's theme of hope is extremely uplifting and inspiring. It is all tied together by Wayne June's (R.I.P) excellent narration. Needless to say, I highly recommend giving this game a try. Good luck and remember that in each of us there is a hopeful light holding fast against the hellish shadows that gather between our good intentions.