Recent reviews by GrumpyKitten

For any who have played the original and enjoyed it, Dragons Dogma 2 is a mixed bag.

The combat and skill tweaks are much better. Character movement is better. The world feels much larger and more full of life. Even using the lantern is easier. The graphics are beautiful when compared to the original. There are a lot of positives.

However pawns are still largely useless and annoying, getting stuck and falling off of cliff faces for no reason. The stagger mechanic is just as frustrating as it is in the first game. Dagger vocations are no longer allowed to combo with bows which just makes your favourite vocation types less interesting for no benefit to gameplay.

To top it off you no longer have an eternal ferrystone and the new health system where you're forced to rest after taking damage, not allowing potions to recover full health without sleep makes the game feel far more grindy. This all distracts you from trying to enjoy what is good about the game.

Simply put many of the old issues still linger in the new game which can all be ignored (mostly) because there are many new good things added to the game. But they've just decided to add new annoyances. It's almost like the devs decided they made the game too good that they feel they need to put new mechanics just to make things more grindy and rage inducing.

If your favourite part of Dragons Dogma 1 was Black Bitter Isle and loot runs. I feel you might find it hard to get into the game for any meaningful amount of time. Imagine while grinding BBI but every five minutes you have to go find a place to camp or run back to the start to sleep because your potions won't fully heal you anymore.

One last thing that deserves it's own paragraph for keyboard and mouse players. DO NOT USE A KEYBOARD. The game opens arrogantly telling you that you need to use a controller. But the thing is, the first game was fine with a keyboard and mouse, right? Well the devs decided in their wisdom to limit your ability to bind keys, such that if you want shift+e to be your bind for helm splitter ability for example... well you're no longer allowed to have anything else bound to e alone! either shift/ctrl+e or just e but both can not be separate bindings. For absolutely no reason at all. It worked fine in the first game. So this means you have to be placing your fingers in all sorts of weird ways for your abilities. This didn't have to be done by the devs but they just wanted to annoy you apparently.

5/10 - Worth a try but don't get your hopes up.

If the game was still in beta I'd say give it a go. But since it's now no longer in beta and it still plays like it is, I would not recommend. Path finding and AI behaviour issue makes the game frustrating e.g. the enemy disappearing then suddenly reappearing inside your base. But what is worse is the lazy scaling of the bosses in the game. Instead of doing something interesting the devs just made the later bosses bullet sponges, which makes the later game dull.

Great game with a great community. 9/10.