It's an interesting take on the survival gathering game. Your car is your lifeline and your mobile base. Early on it's interesting but there was a certain lack of variety in the gameplay. And just some friction.

Partly why I stopped playing is that I needed to complete a mission, but you can't just go from your base to the mission, you have to go from map to map. For this one I had to go 3 maps deep and I ultimately end up failing the mission due to something popping out of the ground I couldn't avoid. Ultimately wrecking my car and losing quite a bit of stuff I had spent the last 90 minutes collecting. And the game wasn't grabbing me enough to do it again.

A toolbelt would have also helped, half my inventory was just tools.

The concept is neat but it could use some iteration to keep it interesting after the first few hours. The story has been done before and the concept of voices over the radio explaining everything isn't particularly compelling.

Dragons Dogma 2 is going to be divisive because there's going to be people that are really going to love the game and people that are going to bounce off of it really hard. It's a game that has a lot of flaws but wears them on the sleeve.

For the good in terms of an organic world, I think it does really pulls it off. The world feels like an actual world that you'd expect to find in a low fantasy type setting with NPCs (mostly pawns though) sprinkled throughout. At first it feels linear but as you unlock other classes/abilities like the mage's levitate you find it's actually pretty expansive, it's just matter of getting over gaps and getting enough vertical.

But while some people are going to love that organic feel, it's also a weakness. Caves in DD2 are well.. just caves. They may have a big enemy or a nice piece of treasure but not always. Ruins are just that, just ruined stone masonry. If you want to contrast it against a game like Elden Ring, Elden Ring doesn't feel like a world you'd expect people to actually live in, but it's got a lot of unique and interesting things to see as a trade off since it isn't beholden to 'make sense'.

Enemies are also part of an issue. There just isn't enough variety and they aren't particularly challenging after a point. A Cyclops is one of the first big enemies you fight, and at first it's fun, climbing on them poking them in the eye. But later in the game, the Cyclops is still the same 2 health bar Cyclops, it might have a bit of armor but ultimately it doesn't prove to be a challenge. After a point the enemies become more annoying since they constantly attack you as you travel around but there's no longer much enjoyment for killing a goblin for the 300th time because some variety of Goblin, Lizard, harpy are what you fight 90% of the time.

Combat though can be fine but it's very class dependent. I found the thief and mystic spearhand the most enjoyable. And some classes are either fairly bland like the sorcerer is just casting/charging spells over and over again and then the trickerster I could write a large rant about how bad that class is in both execution and fun. But as above, combat does get kind of easy so once I was sufficient level it was more a chore.

Story wise it's pretty much an afterthought. There's a huge lack of character personality, motivations, or just character. Empress Nadina who is so important to occupy 1/3 of the cover art is in essentially two quests and does absolutely nothing and isn't interesting at all. This is not a game that you play for the story or really for the characters. That being said the actual character creation is robust and you can make quite a few different looking characters.

TLDR is that it's an experience that will appeal to some more than others but it won't be game of the year. Ultimately it's a better Dragons Dogma but doesn't do much to actually patch the flaws of the first game. Maybe if they do a DLC/Expansion that may help with some of the rougher edges but I don't think it will.

Overall this is a nice little SRPG that was pretty enjoyable. It has inspiration of Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem. The artwork is a treat for the eyes, as per Vanillaware. The combat is real time strategy where you can pause, issue commands then unpause and everyone starts moving. Units are constructed with up to 5 characters eventually allowing you to create different builds. You can make flying anti cav units or heavy shield anti infantry builds.

Additionally it has a FF12 like gambit system, you can define what order a character attempts to use abilities and decide what conditions. This adds a ton of depth and unfortunately it can be a bit obtuse on what the eventual outcome is. When you fight a unit you can shuffle things around but sometimes it isn't exactly clear why this change caused your unit from getting heavily damaged to wiping out the enemy by swapping a couple of units.

Story/character wise it's pretty vanilla. Most characters don't play any significant part in the story, there really is no growth or characterization. Most of the flavor you get is from the rapport (bonding) system's events. Much like FE it throws a ton of characters with you but since most are optional it does nothing with them.

I also enjoyed that unlike most FE games it feels like a war where you're taking territory on the world map. Which is a nice little element I appreciated instead of just going from a menu stage to another menu stage.

It's a game you play for the gameplay. The difficulty wasn't too high, I played on tactical and really had no issue and there's story and normal mode below it for an easier time. It's a good SRPG to fill in the cracks waiting for the next FE game.