A strong beginning and ending unfortunately don't make up for everything in between. When it works, it really works, but there's so much that doesn't that it makes this one hard to love.

This game is far too happy to waste your time at every opportunity. Whether it's a protracted sequence to follow an NPC, or mandatory things to progress only happening on specific days, way too much happens to prolong the experience to its detriment.

It feels like a lot of the writing missed what made the original work and tried to cover with meta nods and it just misses the mark as a result.

It was nice to go on another adventure with York, but I wonder if we really needed it.

Deadly Premonition 2 is one of those sequals that on one hand I really didn't want to happen because I liked the end of the first one so much and on the other hand would welcome to revisit the characters of York and Zach. After playing DP2 i still feel the same way. I think DP2 kinda harms the impact of DP1 but at the same time I loved some of the moments in it. Was it worth it. Ehhh it's debatable but I think not.

When it comes to the actual game though, I was shocked that it had even less of a budget than DP1. Whoo it can be rough let me tell you. If your willing to look past the jank and low FPS you will still find some enjoyment in the weirdness of the series and its world and story. Just have some severe lowered expectations and be a massive fan of the first game and you MIGHT find some enjoyment here. Like I said there was a lot of stuff that i did like but I just wasn't a fan of how it ended. Can't say I would recommend it to the average player though.

what is everyone’s problem
this game is literally as bad as the first game
maybe it’s a bit better since the graphics and the technical aspects have higher standards

i still give it a 1/5 just as the first game cuz this was the chance to finally do a dp that is actually good

Doesn't match the previous game in terms of characters and the town design (even with the smaller size and case that could have allowed for more focus on the area we do have), story, atmosphere, music, crime scenes. Combat is both less atmospheric and even worse and more dragged out than previous game. While the combat in the previous game was more rare and often events playing out in York's mind and with a creepy enemy design and setting, he now is frequently attacked by hordes of random wildlife in the real world and the more supernatural fights are now faster paced and seem to be trying to be more exciting without having any idea how to make a remotely competent third person shooter. Terrible framerate can make the game almost unplayable in certain sections (applies to the Switch version). I think it actually might looks worse than the almost 11 year old first game.

A lot of gamefied BS, fetch quests, slow follow quests, poor use of time management. People are either just not interesting or were made overly eccentric, but you don't really have the side quests and events to get to know the main cast, towns people, or the town itself. Even after the patch made some text edits it is still transphobic in the direction the story goes, typically in a more incompetent way than likely trying to be as some previous text made it seem. York is still entertaining though not to the heights he was, he could still do a lot of work to carry the game but unlike last time nothing else is helping or amplifying him. Story has its moments but is often extremely convenient to lead to the events that happen and for the majority of it to have taken place before the first game. Even the before credits monologue is odd talking about how the town could heal after 14 years when really no one should have been that effected and weren't even acting like they when you were there in the past. Your main antagonist just kind of shows up out of nowhere, the plot doesn't have many surprises. It has a good finale, that it didn't really earn and that is made more hollow by 14 years having gone by and with none of the events of this game mentioned even in the previous that took place 10 years ago.

Even with the first game being one of my favorites I can't really recommend this. A lot of the issues seems to stem from the first game likely doing the best with what they had and having more heart behind it before becoming a surprise cult hit for a lot of people. The sequel can get some things almost right but is mostly a lot of trying to recreate the first by seemingly often being intentionally incompetent or focusing too much on unnecessary elements.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1333947303334354944

Deary me. A step down from the original in pretty much every way.

Kinda wild that it makes the first game's setting feel so real and lived in by comparison. A very bare bones vibe to the whole thing. Runs like absolute dogshit, and gets excused by memefucks who want in on The Patter and never played the original on 360 where it's fine.

Nice to see York and Zach again.

If I could describe this game with a phrase, it'd be "not as good."

The story's not as good. The ending's not as good. The writing's not as good. The music's not as good. The setting's not as good.

It's not terrible, but it's a far cry from what the original was, and it doesn't seem to understand what made the original special in the first place.

the first deadly premonition became one of my favorite games of all time after i played it a few months ago. i can honestly say that not a single day has gone by where i haven't thought about that game at least a little, either through a funny and memorable scene of dialogue or some connection i suddenly pieced together about the game's themes and its gameplay. the second game is a bit of a disappointment. i didn't expect it to surpass the original, and while at its best moments it matches some of that game's charm, during its worst moments it doesn't come even close or doesn't try. it's about as underwhelming as i expected, but at least it's not the disaster i feared it could be.

the dialogue is still excellent. if you enjoyed the first game you will undoubtably have a great time listening to york interact with the world and comment on his situation. this is really the sole reason i don't hate this game. i was always eager to turn it on and keep playing because york's dialogue is memorable and quotable and there are many hilariously bizarre scenes that i will be thinking about for years.

unfortunately that's about the only thing the sequel does as well as the original. the world feels lifeless and there are much fewer interactable npcs, which severely limits the pool of potential suspects. the story is interesting but the payoff is underwhelming and a lot of the twists feel forced or unbelievable. the otherworld sections are completely lacking the horror aesthetic that made them interesting in the original and rather than serve as twisted versions of the town's landmarks, are completely separate locations that all share the exact same setting and assets. the main issue with the game is that it just doesn't expand the first game very much. i don't feel like i have a better understanding of this world, its lore or its characters after beating it. it was just another miscellaneous adventure starring york, and the payoff of the present-day segments is so minimal that it feels like they didn't need to be there.

there are also some really uncomfortable depictions of racism and transphobia in the game that, even if they don't bother you personally, are completely unnecessary. swery has addressed these and says he plans to change or remove them. hopefully he is able to fix the problem but it really shouldn't have been in the game to begin with. edit: problem was not fixed

overall, i had a lot of good experiences playing this game but i don't think it was worth returning to the world of deadly premonition for the game we ended up getting. the universe of deadly premonition has a lot of room to expand the setting and lore, but this game barely does that.

edit #2: upon further thought, i like this game a lot less than the thoughts i had originally wrote out led on. i gave this game a 6/10 then, which i wrote after playing it on release, but it's been a couple of months since then and i'm struggling to remember any of what i thought were standout moments. the only positive thing i had to talk about was the memorable writing but nowadays i can only remember the parts of the story that frustrate me.

The first Deadly Premonition is undeniably flawed in every way. Yet, it managed to attain an unlikely cult classic status despite all its faults due to the oddball vision and lofty aspirations of its director Hidetaka Suehiro ("Swery65"). The "Director's Cut" version I played on PS3 even stands as one of my favorite games of all time. So between that and also loving SWERY's twice as insane follow-up, the forever unfinished D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, this long-awaited sequel to his most polarizing gem was something I was massively looking forward to, with it sitting alongside No More Heroes III as my primary reasons for wanting a Switch at all. Unfortunately, now that I've finally played it the old adage about lightning never striking twice comes to mind, because this fails to recapture the weird brilliance of its predecessor.

If you look back at why the original title was able to skate by you'll find it was largely on the strength of its story and characters, neither of which are as interesting or enjoyable here. There's still plenty of borderline goofy strangeness, but the overall tone is darker and moodier which isn't much fun in comparison. Plus, the new cast is kind of flat, lacking memorability and are mostly unlikable. Your primary sidekick is a bratty little girl and the FBI agent "Aaliyah," who is regularly alluded to as potentially being the new lead in future installments, is a straight-up shrew. Thus there's no one to latch onto other than the returning protagonist York, whose penchant for endless movie references and prattling on about utter nonsense like a child has begun to become more grating than endearing. All this while having to put up with sad attempts at social commentary on race, discrimination, and American life from a man who clearly has no idea how any of that works stateside.

The area where it really drops the ball though is the gameplay where none of the previous outing's ambition can be found. This is most evident in the open-world. Unlike the believable, rich in personality small town of before, we got a dull, empty feeling expanse without any exciting sights or noteworthy landmarks that's meant to eat up your time by way of travel distance rather than giving you a reason to explore. In fact, the mission structure itself seems designed to artificially keep you playing for as long as possible by tasking you with searching random vending machines across the map for the one that has the food item you need or following a slow-moving NPC for in-game miles between multiple objectives. I enjoyed the shooting segments since I didn't have to put up with the monotony of everything else, like the constant clicking through dialog present in the visual novel interrogation segments, but I can't deny they suffer from nearly all taking place in a series of identical corridors and enemies not posing much of a threat. At least the boss battles are cool.

I've heard many state that the reason this falls so woefully short of expectations as being the result of its creator misunderstanding the appeal of his prior work. I can't agree. In my opinion the issue is him proving unable to conjure ideas compelling enough to fully bring this continuation (and expansion) to life, leading to a phoned in effort without verve or excitement. It's not unplayable or painful to complete, instead just missing the imagination to make it anything greater than dull, lifeless, and boring. Considering how crucial a sense of creativity and inspiration were to the success of its forerunners, the absence of them makes this less Deadly Premonition, and more Dead on Arrival.

Note: The technical problems you'll see referenced in other reviews (e.g. the frame rate) have either been patched out or are not a factor running on the console's Lite model which is why they aren't mentioned here.

5/10

Awful and essentially unplayable.

Such a shame that Deadly Premonition revisionism is so entrenched that even the creators thought being a technical shambles was “part of the charm” - the 360 original ran perfectly fine and was fantastic because of its ambition & heart despite its budget and technical shortcomings.

This? A cynical 10 frame a second travesty.

Avoid

Even as someone who wasn't a diehard fan of the original game, I still kinda came away from this game feeling a little disappointed. Which blows.

York is a highlight in all his usual absurdities, despite him being an even more intolerable movie nerd here than in the first game. I love the interrogation scenes with Zach and Aaliyah, the detective vs. detective tension with Aaliyah questioning all the weird bullshit that York/Zach does in the games that we all assumed as proper and order, the amount of character stuff and dialogue you get during these parts was great. Was always great cutting back to these and seeing how they framed the Le Carre stuff as I progressed further. Houngan's theme is a banger. The story in Le Carre had some cool moments and I appreciated that Patricia was the straight guy to York, even though Patricia is literally 10 years old and York is a fully grown adult.

Generally I had a good time playing it but by the end of it I kinda looked back on it with disappointment. I feel like so much of carrying the jank and let downs of the base game relied on the story and characters...and the characters were doing a good job for most of it! And the story was going to cool places!...but unfortunately the game kinda ends too soon and on a limp note, which means that the entire house of cards falls down.

Suddenly the lack of people or anything to do in Le Carre becomes a lot more harder to accept. The abysmal performance on the Switch becomes more unacceptable and the horrific pacing of the main quest becomes a thumping pain. If the story ended up wrapping up in a well rounded or weirdly Swery way then I probably would have left feeling satisfied but it feels like the story just didn't have enough effort put into it. You'll probably just end up walking away from it feeling like there could've been more done to it, both story and gameplay wise.

Shame.

Right so Deadly Premonition is my favourite game of all time. Not because I think it's so bad it's good, but because I think it's a masterpiece with a couple of rough edges.

Yes there was some jank, yes the combat felt like a cheap Resident Evil 4 and yes there were some incredibly frustrating quick time events, but the voice acting was fantastic and fit with the characters, every character from the main cast to the side NPCs were all unique, Greenvale felt like a real place with a deep and fleshed-out world and it's one of the very few games to make me shed a tear with how much it grabbed me in and made me care for its characters.

This sequel was never going to live up to the original for me, I knew that, yet I'm still let down. An average of 15fps and three crashes in 20 hours isn't acceptable. Yes, Deadly Premonition was known for running terrible but only in ports on PS3, PC and the Switch prior to some patching. The original Xbox 360 version ran at a mostly stable 30fps and technically worked fine. It frustrates me that people are excusing that state it's in as part of the charm when it never was to begin with, even more so that I can imagine the devs knowing this and using it as an excuse to release it in such a state.

Even more so, if this game gets patched and works at a solid 60fps it won't fix a lot of the problems. Le Carre feels mostly lifeless and empty, the cast doesn't have anything on those of the last game, the trans character is handled pretty terribly, York impersonating an African man is needless and pointless, the otherworld sections are far worse than before as they have been reduced to a few hallways with nothing but full combat where at least the first had puzzles and was scary and the new cartoony art style just doesn't fit the tone.

As for what good I can say, the soundtrack is great even if half of it is from the original, the cast all give good performances and the 2019 sections are really intriguing even if they can drag on a bit

Even if it's patched I find it hard to recommend this to anyone unless you absolutely loved the original and need to know what happened after it like me, even if I would have preferred that story to have stayed contained.