izigame.me

TLDR: A really great game, but in my opinion the first game is much better. Read on for details.
Finally DDII is upon us and that means more blood, sweat and tears as we try to delve into this dark, Lovecraftian world and face the horrors and challenges it has. While going over each feature, I'm going to make a comparison to the first game as well, as a lot of things have been changed. From gameplay standpoint, DDII is quite different to the first game, which means that fans of the first might not necessarily like everything in it.
Firstly, the glum dark fantasy setting is very much the same, and we get to explore some new areas to see more of it. So thematically and atmospherically it's similar to the first game. The overarching gameplay, however, is totally different. Instead of managing an estate and sending recruits into dungeons, we now just pick a team of 4 characters, place them in a stagecoach, and have it go through one long rogue-like run through multiple regions till it reaches the Mountain boss. The mountain bosses are like final bosses of each run, and there are 5 in total. We have to defeat each one to unlock the next one.
This approach is more similar to standard roguelikes, where you build up your team and try to win the whole run in one go, and if you lose, then you lose the whole thing and start over from the very beginning. I personally think the approach in the first game was miles better and more rewarding, as here, the sense of progression is almost non-existing. You lose a run and you often feel that you've just wasted time, especially if you lost it due to really bad luck. There are some things we can unlock with candles that we find during the run, so at least there's that. Now the game is loads of fun of course, so I didn't mind losing runs frequently, but after a while it starts to feel quite repetitive. The runs themselves are way too long, in my mind. So if you can do everything and just lose on the mountain boss, you just have to redo 2-3 hours again as you go through all the regions once more, and like this again and again. In the first game, if you lost to a boss, you could take another party to the same dungeon and face the same boss within 15 minutes, which wastes a lot less of your time.
The combat is very similar to the first game: teams of 4 vs 4, position-sensitive skills, death's door, etc. A few things are different. The stress system has been largely dumbed down. Gone are the multitudes of afflictions unfortunately and seeing your characters turning into paranoid, masochistic, foul-mouthed wretches. Now if full stress is reached, the character just goes into a meltdown - losing most of their HP and some rep with their teammates, but other than that, there are no lasting repercussions to a build up of stress, which is a shame as it makes this system a bit trivialised.
DOTs now have one more type in addition to bleed and blight, and that's burn, which is great, although not largely different to the other two. Some enemies now have the death's door mechanic too, and can survive at 0 HP, requiring us to finish them off. Usually this is only common to larger, more dangerous enemies, though most of them have a low deathblow resist and can be finished off quickly.
One major overhaul to the combat system is the inclusion of tokens. Forget about the stats we've had in the first game. Now most things are done through more granulated buffs and debuffs, mainly in increments of 25% and 50%, which feels rather oversimplified if I am honest. Moreover, these tokens are applied willy-nilly, so usually before getting to damage the enemies, your first few strikes would be wasted on removing their armour or missing due to them having dodge tokens. In some fights it does create a more interesting strategy, but in many it feels more like a slog, as some enemies are notorious for reapplying dodge and guard tokens after every time they attack.
Most character classes return from the first game, although a few did not make the cut - Abomination, Antiquarian (though they appear as an enemy), Arbalest, Crusader, Houndmaster, Shieldbreaker.
Those that did make the cut, most are still great and have some juicy new skills for us to use. A few I feel have gotten worse. Namely Leper and Vestal. Leper had trouble with accuracy in the first game, but with trinkets you could mitigate that. Now, every time he hits, he gets a blinded token (50% miss on next attack), and he starts combat with those too. So, unless he has his teammates marking the enemies, he'll keep missing every second hit. Vestal's healing abilities got too many restrictions now (cooldowns AND only working on someone with low HP), so most of the time you'll end up using her for attacking, which other classes are much better at. Also not a fan of what they did with Bounty Hunter. He cannot be picked at the start of a run and can only be gotten if you happen to come across him at the inn. No idea why this approach was taken, but it was really unneeded.
There's one new fun class - the Runaway, a rank-flexible class specialising in burns and debuffs.
In DDII is also not possible to pick duplicates of the same class in a team. So if you want to go for, say 4 Lepers, you can't anymore, so team compositions are much fewer now than in the first game.
Each character class now has some backstory sequences that we can view when visiting a certain type of shrine. Completing these help us to unlock their skills. I liked most of the situations in those. They were kind of like puzzles that needed to be solved.
There is now a relationship system. Team members now have an opinion about one another, based on some choices we make in-combat and out of combat. Healing another teammate while this one is low on HP, they'll remember that. Or choosing to fight a battle when they want to flee, they'll not like it. Upon entry into each new region, positive or negative relationships can form between teammates. Positive ones give some boons to them and at times slapping back an enemy that dared to attack their best friend, while negative ones cause them to debuff or stress each other, and at times even hit each other mid-battle. A very nice idea, although it's understandable why not everyone likes this game mechanic as the amount of player agency in forming these relations is quite limited. I think if players could influence this more, it would've been better. It is still, however, possible to win even with all negative relations. I had one such scenario where my squabbling team hated each other's guts, every single one of them hated the others, and yet somehow they came victorious in that run. Go figure.
Art in my opinion has greatly improved from DD1. Character models are more 3D now and much more detailed. New enemy designs are wonderful. Music is just as great and memorable (a few combat tracks, such as foetor and shroud ones, are masterpieces). Narration once again is amazing and nice to listen to even after 60 hours of playtime.
Overall, DD2 is great. Its gameplay formula in my mind is weaker than DD1, but it's still loads of fun and still has the spirit of what makes DD so great. Perhaps it doesn't surpass DD1, but at least it can hold a candle to it (pun intended).