Fun combat with varied characters and great looking models and animations, but loses the personality from growing characters and your town over time and replaces that growth with busywork and a surprising lack of content for a sequel.
Darkest Dungeon 2 changes up the formula of the previous game, instead of upgrading a town and a roster of characters over time while sending them on short excursions to explorable dungeons, you know choose a party of four characters that traverse different locations in a stagecoach fighting or interacting with events as you choose route directions with upcoming obstacles possibly revealed through random scouting chances when you enter a map or by finding watchtowers or scouting through an event. Instead of the short dungeon trips that you can finish, retreat, or get everyone killed in broken up by upgrading your town to improve characters, items, and healing and sanity regeneration you now have a much longer run as you attempt to manage your groups sanity and relationships by choosing random events that hopefully raise character affinity to one another, attempting to land on hospital locations to remove negative character traits or diseases, and you will attempt to kill at least one location boss in each run by fighting through the boss lair to collect a trophy from that boss. The goal of each run is to travel through a set number of locations, with inns that offer healing, sanity restoration, skill training, and item sales between each location, before you get to the final mountain location which requires a boss trophy to enter. At the end of the mountain is one of five bosses depending on the current confession choice you have selected before each run.
Combat is still very similar to the previous game and is fun, has some great animation, and narrated with some well done and entertaining voicework. Your party members each have five equipped skills with each skill able to be used in certain positions in the formation and can be used to target allies under certain conditions or enemies that are standing at a targetable spot in their formation. Your skills can inflict a mixture of damage, critical hits, heals, sanity restoration, stuns, knockbacks, pulls, burn damage over time, blight damage over time, dodge chance, armor to cut a percentage of damage, shields that have one character taking damage in place of an ally, bleed damage over time, set other characters up for additional skill effects, etc. Between each fight while traveling to the next event you can access the skill screen where you can swap out which five of a character's 11 skills will be active in the next battle, change your formation, and you can equip each character with two trinkets and one item they can use in combat. The ability to use items as a free action in combat, varied trinkets with some being made for certain characters, and each character now having a generic or three sub class types that makes certain abilities or resistances they have better or worse there is some good variety when it comes to party composition. Although a few of the subclasses can be a bit questionable in terms of viability or are clearly going to be worse than other options unless you are just wanting to mess around.
Character sanity levels have to be managed as well. Taking a critical hit or damage from certain types of attacks can raise their sanity meter from 1-10. Once you are around four you have a high chance during travel that someone's bad mood might worsen relationships or have negative effects, but in battle hitting the max of 10 will cause either a meltdown where they lose significant health and lower their relationship with allies or a small chance to become resolute where they will empty their sanity meter and heal themselves. Character relationships are raised or lowered through random event choices, random positive or negative effects during travel, item use in inns, and occasional based on actions taken in battles. Lower relationships give a chance for negative effects between two characters to take effect while higher levels give a chance to gain positive effects whenever you leave an inn. These relationship effects cause characters to give positive or negative effects to allies when certain skills are used or can have their friends jump in to buff, attack with them, or defend them in some way.
For the most part the game works fine except for a few issues people that liked the previous game or who would prefer that system might have. You are stuck with the same party (unless someone dies then a new character for each death can be randomly selected at an inn, which is potentially its own problem given some party compositions now working well), you are much more effected by bad luck or lack of area knowledge due to the much lengthier runs, the only thing you can carry over for a character is if they survive a run and you use them again they will keep the same positive and negative quirks and any disease they had by the end your skill training, relationships, and items are all reset.
The biggest issues with the game are the lack of content and busywork built into the design. Each location has one boss, a few repeated enemy types, and each of the five confession choices do little to influence the game other than possibly changing how many locations you need to go through, what kind of buffs certain types of enemies use, and the final boss. Some characters certainly feel a bit stronger than others but they all have their own feel to them and are well animated, but there are less characters than in the previous game and the Bounty Hunter has now been relegated to being a random chance party add you can find at an inn that has to replace one of your other characters for one location. When it comes to busywork you now have to find shrines during runs in order to unlock the majority of skills for each character. Each character starts with five unlocked skills and unlocks the other six by going through five events at these shrines, most of these are text/narration based that give you more insight into a character's past but a few will have a little objective based battle you engage in as their past self. A cool way to give more personality to characters and something that can come into play for them during the final boss battle with the last confession, but you might need to make 2-3 full runs per character to unlock all of their skills and many locked skills are things that are needed for a character to be useful. The game is significantly harder when characters lack their basic skills, especially when some parties just don't even have the ability to deal with certain threats without these options. This amounts to hours and hours of time to get these skills unlocked and as just an obvious bad design choice it means that when you see these shrines scouted you are almost certainly going to go for it no matter how bad of a route choice it might be as you ignore a part of the game just to get this over with.
The town upgrading over time has been replaced by a series of shrines you access before a run where you spend candles to unlock things, candles are gained from completing objectives or finding them in runs or by doing a character tasks that they have on each run (often killing a type of enemy or using an ability so many times in one battle). These unlocks are passive upgrades like unlocking other characters for use, increasing character resistances, unlocking subclasses, bonuses to your stagecoach that can include better scouting or ability to carry more items or find more candles, and you can use candles to unlock a wider variety of items that you can find in your runs, passive items that can make the game easier or harder like pets you or different types of flames you can add to the stagecoach, etc. At its best, you are spending time to basically just unlock basic game mechanics or to make things functional in the same way you do by unlocking character skills, and at worst once you have what you want the entire candle system just become almost pointless for the rest of the time you plan to play the game. On a positive note, a lot of games that have you unlocking a lot of items you can find in roguelite runs over is adding things to the world that are either nearly useless in general or nearly useless for many playstyles and while you can see items you will likely have little use for I tended to just notice more wider varieties of similar item types rather than a complete lack of things I need that have been replaced with more and more garbage over time. An odd oversight seems to be that you also start a run with the random items you have unlocked since your previous run so that added element could have given some minor use to the candles you will get at the end of each run but once you have unlocked everything it no longer allows you to spend candles on random items. It is also kind of unfortunate that, while you unlock some cosmetic character changes that alter weapons or colors, you can't unlock their past looks that characters have during their shrine events, it's also a minor annoyance that you can't save skill and subclass settings and that you need to reselect everything for each new run.
The randomness of the design can also lead to some unfortunate occurrences like just not having items you want appearing for sale, constant repeated types of events you are trying to avoid, characters wanting to do things during events that upset other characters (and probably don't often make mechanical sense or sense for the personality shown by them during their shrine events) or just don't make sense like wanting to get scouting information when you already have the map filled or are at the end of it or wanting to fix stagecoach armor or wheels when both are already at their highest condition.
It's a fun game but if you are trying to complete each of the character skill sets and get through every confession you are going to be seeing the same content over and over and over and it's a shame they didn't give much personality to characters when it comes to their interactions with each other since they took a route where each one is now their own unique person with their own past they you see. With future plans to add new enemies, bosses, and characters to the game more of the needed variety to your runs should be given as the game continues to grow.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685793792908275713
Videos
Darkest Dungeon II - Seething Sigh Resentment Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/c7qMjAZjqQw
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Focused Fault Obsession Boss Battle (1.0 version of boss): https://youtu.be/fSk4bX5VW3I
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Ravenous Reach Ambition Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/YB6zVYO41Vo
Darkest Dungeon 2 changes up the formula of the previous game, instead of upgrading a town and a roster of characters over time while sending them on short excursions to explorable dungeons, you know choose a party of four characters that traverse different locations in a stagecoach fighting or interacting with events as you choose route directions with upcoming obstacles possibly revealed through random scouting chances when you enter a map or by finding watchtowers or scouting through an event. Instead of the short dungeon trips that you can finish, retreat, or get everyone killed in broken up by upgrading your town to improve characters, items, and healing and sanity regeneration you now have a much longer run as you attempt to manage your groups sanity and relationships by choosing random events that hopefully raise character affinity to one another, attempting to land on hospital locations to remove negative character traits or diseases, and you will attempt to kill at least one location boss in each run by fighting through the boss lair to collect a trophy from that boss. The goal of each run is to travel through a set number of locations, with inns that offer healing, sanity restoration, skill training, and item sales between each location, before you get to the final mountain location which requires a boss trophy to enter. At the end of the mountain is one of five bosses depending on the current confession choice you have selected before each run.
Combat is still very similar to the previous game and is fun, has some great animation, and narrated with some well done and entertaining voicework. Your party members each have five equipped skills with each skill able to be used in certain positions in the formation and can be used to target allies under certain conditions or enemies that are standing at a targetable spot in their formation. Your skills can inflict a mixture of damage, critical hits, heals, sanity restoration, stuns, knockbacks, pulls, burn damage over time, blight damage over time, dodge chance, armor to cut a percentage of damage, shields that have one character taking damage in place of an ally, bleed damage over time, set other characters up for additional skill effects, etc. Between each fight while traveling to the next event you can access the skill screen where you can swap out which five of a character's 11 skills will be active in the next battle, change your formation, and you can equip each character with two trinkets and one item they can use in combat. The ability to use items as a free action in combat, varied trinkets with some being made for certain characters, and each character now having a generic or three sub class types that makes certain abilities or resistances they have better or worse there is some good variety when it comes to party composition. Although a few of the subclasses can be a bit questionable in terms of viability or are clearly going to be worse than other options unless you are just wanting to mess around.
Character sanity levels have to be managed as well. Taking a critical hit or damage from certain types of attacks can raise their sanity meter from 1-10. Once you are around four you have a high chance during travel that someone's bad mood might worsen relationships or have negative effects, but in battle hitting the max of 10 will cause either a meltdown where they lose significant health and lower their relationship with allies or a small chance to become resolute where they will empty their sanity meter and heal themselves. Character relationships are raised or lowered through random event choices, random positive or negative effects during travel, item use in inns, and occasional based on actions taken in battles. Lower relationships give a chance for negative effects between two characters to take effect while higher levels give a chance to gain positive effects whenever you leave an inn. These relationship effects cause characters to give positive or negative effects to allies when certain skills are used or can have their friends jump in to buff, attack with them, or defend them in some way.
For the most part the game works fine except for a few issues people that liked the previous game or who would prefer that system might have. You are stuck with the same party (unless someone dies then a new character for each death can be randomly selected at an inn, which is potentially its own problem given some party compositions now working well), you are much more effected by bad luck or lack of area knowledge due to the much lengthier runs, the only thing you can carry over for a character is if they survive a run and you use them again they will keep the same positive and negative quirks and any disease they had by the end your skill training, relationships, and items are all reset.
The biggest issues with the game are the lack of content and busywork built into the design. Each location has one boss, a few repeated enemy types, and each of the five confession choices do little to influence the game other than possibly changing how many locations you need to go through, what kind of buffs certain types of enemies use, and the final boss. Some characters certainly feel a bit stronger than others but they all have their own feel to them and are well animated, but there are less characters than in the previous game and the Bounty Hunter has now been relegated to being a random chance party add you can find at an inn that has to replace one of your other characters for one location. When it comes to busywork you now have to find shrines during runs in order to unlock the majority of skills for each character. Each character starts with five unlocked skills and unlocks the other six by going through five events at these shrines, most of these are text/narration based that give you more insight into a character's past but a few will have a little objective based battle you engage in as their past self. A cool way to give more personality to characters and something that can come into play for them during the final boss battle with the last confession, but you might need to make 2-3 full runs per character to unlock all of their skills and many locked skills are things that are needed for a character to be useful. The game is significantly harder when characters lack their basic skills, especially when some parties just don't even have the ability to deal with certain threats without these options. This amounts to hours and hours of time to get these skills unlocked and as just an obvious bad design choice it means that when you see these shrines scouted you are almost certainly going to go for it no matter how bad of a route choice it might be as you ignore a part of the game just to get this over with.
The town upgrading over time has been replaced by a series of shrines you access before a run where you spend candles to unlock things, candles are gained from completing objectives or finding them in runs or by doing a character tasks that they have on each run (often killing a type of enemy or using an ability so many times in one battle). These unlocks are passive upgrades like unlocking other characters for use, increasing character resistances, unlocking subclasses, bonuses to your stagecoach that can include better scouting or ability to carry more items or find more candles, and you can use candles to unlock a wider variety of items that you can find in your runs, passive items that can make the game easier or harder like pets you or different types of flames you can add to the stagecoach, etc. At its best, you are spending time to basically just unlock basic game mechanics or to make things functional in the same way you do by unlocking character skills, and at worst once you have what you want the entire candle system just become almost pointless for the rest of the time you plan to play the game. On a positive note, a lot of games that have you unlocking a lot of items you can find in roguelite runs over is adding things to the world that are either nearly useless in general or nearly useless for many playstyles and while you can see items you will likely have little use for I tended to just notice more wider varieties of similar item types rather than a complete lack of things I need that have been replaced with more and more garbage over time. An odd oversight seems to be that you also start a run with the random items you have unlocked since your previous run so that added element could have given some minor use to the candles you will get at the end of each run but once you have unlocked everything it no longer allows you to spend candles on random items. It is also kind of unfortunate that, while you unlock some cosmetic character changes that alter weapons or colors, you can't unlock their past looks that characters have during their shrine events, it's also a minor annoyance that you can't save skill and subclass settings and that you need to reselect everything for each new run.
The randomness of the design can also lead to some unfortunate occurrences like just not having items you want appearing for sale, constant repeated types of events you are trying to avoid, characters wanting to do things during events that upset other characters (and probably don't often make mechanical sense or sense for the personality shown by them during their shrine events) or just don't make sense like wanting to get scouting information when you already have the map filled or are at the end of it or wanting to fix stagecoach armor or wheels when both are already at their highest condition.
It's a fun game but if you are trying to complete each of the character skill sets and get through every confession you are going to be seeing the same content over and over and over and it's a shame they didn't give much personality to characters when it comes to their interactions with each other since they took a route where each one is now their own unique person with their own past they you see. With future plans to add new enemies, bosses, and characters to the game more of the needed variety to your runs should be given as the game continues to grow.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685793792908275713
Videos
Darkest Dungeon II - Seething Sigh Resentment Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/c7qMjAZjqQw
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Focused Fault Obsession Boss Battle (1.0 version of boss): https://youtu.be/fSk4bX5VW3I
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Ravenous Reach Ambition Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/YB6zVYO41Vo