Recent reviews by iamdeathnote1

You do realize you don't have to make the claw game mechanics as frustrating as a real claw machine, right? There's absolutely no reason for the claw to randomly let things go, the magnet to tell you to go ♥♥♥♥ yourself and not bother to pick up metal, the tentacle to not actually suction to something or spread out in water. Until the day those are fixed, and this is more akin to a game than a digital version of the rigged claw mechanics we all know and hate, I cannot recommend this to anyone

TL;DR: If you're fine with crashes and losing progress, go ahead and play, otherwise I'd go for one of the earlier CMS games

For a long while, this was really an amazing game, as well as every previous game in the series. However, as of late, I cannot recommend this game. Intricate, detailed, but not going too far in to the deep end. Now? The game hard crashes my computer every single time I play. This is extremely frustrating, because there is no time auto-save, it'll only auto-save once you finish a job. If you're only fixing cars with small issues, this really isn't an issue, 5-20 minutes between saves so you'll never lose much. The problem comes shines full force with project cars. Disassemble an engine? crash. Dismantle the suspension? Crash. Upgrade parts? Crash. Salvage? Crash. Sell parts? Crash. After an hour or two of you doing something, the game will full blackscreen, lock everything up (I even tried plugging a usb flashlight in to the port and it wouldn't even deliver power to it) and you will have to restart your computer. So I tried saving more often, regularly stopping what I'm doing to manually save every 15-20 minutes, figuring that would solve my problem with the issue (I don't care if it crashes, it's my progress I care about). After about two hours, cue blackscreen crash, I restart my computer, not worried this time because I had saved about five minutes prior to it crashing. I load the game, and my progress is reverted to the games last auto-save from finishing a job, rather than my manual saving that I did prior to the crash. So again, all that progress is lost. I do enjoy the start of the game, fixing cars and what not, but my goal is to make custom cars, and I can no longer do that because of these stability issues.

An honest and objective review from a DD on release fanboy.
6.5/10 on launch
7/10 on initial update.

The Good:
Like the original Dragon's Dogma, DD2 has a wonderfully beautiful, sprawling open world. The map size reminds me of DD+DA, and there's plenty of places to visit. When you get in the groove of combat, it feels amazing. You can fully take advantage of enemy missteps, knocking them off balance, and punish them with a violently gruesome counterattack. The story is a delightfully different, yet familiar tale, pulling you in while you're all too willing. I really didn't want to stop playing when I would take my breaks. The new vocations are a welcome breath of fresh air, with the Mystic Spearhand stealing the spotlight, the Trickster putting you squarely in the support seat, and the elusive Warfarer (NOT Wayfarer) taking the jack of all trades, master of none role for the ultimate flexibility. Upgrades for weapons and armor are still present, but now it actually matters where you go. Vermund offering a balance between magick and physical, the elves give much more magick and magick defense, Battahl preferring physical damage and defense, and the steadfast dwarven* smith making your weapons more likely to knock down, while making your armor more difficult to stagger. The pawn system has also had a decent upgrade, adding pawn quests for completing a pawns' objective like hunting or camping for items and money. They can also have a personality type which will make them combine items for you, sell items for you, help you find items on the map, or even using curatives on you and your party.

The Bad:
Jesus Christ, where do I begin. We'll start with bugs. The bugs in the game range from enemies disappearing, yet still able to attack you. Can't target them, either, be it magic, magic archer, ranger, any melee move, the MSH's entire move-set. Textures loading and unloading. Your pawns will just flat out disappear. I highly recommend not spending RC on pawns for this reason. While we get new bosses (Sphinx, Gorgon, Dullahan, Minotaur), we lose SO MANY for it. There's now only one dragon, no hydra, cockatrice, evil eye, dominator, silver and golden knight, ghost solider. But I hope you like saurians and harpies! Two new saurians, a new harpy. But we also lost three saurians, gargoyles, and sirens. You get more goblin variety. Just kidding, they took away more goblins than they added. When I mentioned combat, it's good once you get in to the groove. Prior to that, it's worse than the original. You also lose access to half of your possible skill set, which severely hampers every class, especially the Warfarer, because you need to use a skill to swap weapons on the fly. A LOT of the voice acting is SUUUUPER stiff, especially the elfs. Like they went on Fivrr, found the person that looked the most like the character while still being a Fivrr, and just went with the first take. Oh, and I hope you didn't want to keep anything. Airtight flasks are no longer in the game. Which is ironic, because it would be far more useful in this compared to all of DDDA.

The Ugly:
Time for the elephants in the room. MTX, DRM, and CPU hemorrhaging. Almost every MTX item is available in game (The Heartfelt pendant is the only one that you can't, and it's ACTUAL dlc), it's available early on, and if you REALLY hate waiting, go to nexus mods and download a mod to make everything available early and for 1gp. If you want to complain that it makes the game easier, don't buy it. Capcom has ALWAYS had DLC like this in EVERY game for the past decade. As for the CPU problems: First title update actually helped, but there's still a lot of improvement that needs to be made. Your game will still die in the cities. I actively avoid cities and towns and just heal by camping or the volcanic island town. I can maintain Cyberpunk 2077 60 fps during everything except the most intense explosive scenes, but walking through Vermund has dropped me as low as 15 fps. That's jarring in and of itself, but the city can get raided by monsters, which cripples performance even more. And finally; Denuvo. People saying they're taking performance hits from it are full of ♥♥♥♥. It's actually implemented in a way that the game itself is the performance issue. It also allows five separate PC's PER DAY. If you're hitting more than five PCs in one day, you're not downloading the game just for personal use, and you know it. Don't ♥♥♥♥♥ because you have to buy multiple copies of the game for your net cafe.

In all honesty, this game isn't worth the $70. It's a $60 game, and this is where I would tell you to buy the game. Don't buy this game unless it's on sale for $60 or less. At least, right now in this state. I'm glad I found a presale sale for it.

The game can be fun, but it's extremely repetitive until that point. Early spells without runes are basically the same with different elements. They're still viable for a whole run, generally sitting on my spell bar the whole time, but you have way more and more fun options down the line. Add a timer for things like flight. Nothing quite like a run being ruined because I dared to use flight over a gap.

It has a panther woman. That's good enough to at least try