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The Automatons who infiltrated and tried to force a PSN account linking have been located and destroyed. This requirement is no longer going forward. All Citizens who heroically changed their review to Negative to weed out this threat are to be commended and are now encouraged to change their review back to what it previously was.

DEMOCRACY HAS PREVAILED
DEMOCRACY WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL

Hoo boy, where do I begin? Darkest Dungeon II is basically like what Zelda II is to the original Legend of Zelda. The characters look familiar, some other things are familiar, but it's essentially a different game. Sequels are supposed to take what's good about their predecessor and improve upon them. DD2 takes all that was good and ♥♥♥♥♥ all over it, making pretty much every system worse and less player friendly.

Heals are now locked until a character has taken enough damage. On top of that they have lengthy cooldowns and are not very effective. At least in DD1, the low heal efficacy was countered a bit by being able to use them whenever you'd like. In DD2, you basically have to wait until your hero is a bloody pulp before the magical inspiration finds you.

Stuns now require 2 separate heroes to pull off. In DD1, managing crowd control was the name of the game and would let you go into battles strategically, making sure high threat targets were held off as long as possible. Here, you have to apply a debuff, then apply a second debuff for the stun to land, each with a chance of being resisted. Oh and by the way, the enemies ignore this new system and can just flat out stun you in a hit.

To add to the enemy advantage, many enemies now have their own Death's Door, meaning that focusing a high threat enemy early is considerably more difficult as you'll sometimes beat on their undying bloody husk for 2 rounds before they finally stop attacking and die already.

Stress is significantly easier to accumulate, just as difficult to remove, and breaking will now basically toss a coin to see whether that hero will make it through or be completely screwed, dropping them down to 10% health instantly.

The stagecoach is baffling as well. It is a new "Slay the Spire" type method for traversing your run but with a terrible little minigame built in where you have to try and move a ♥♥♥♥♥♥, hard to control, coach into the path of debris on the road to try and run it over in hopes of finding items in it. But while you're traveling from node to node, your wheels can break, you can be randomly assaulted by a wave of flying arrows, and eventually you'll have to stop and "repair" your cart while fending off an attack. Instead of letting you just fight the fight and go on your way, the devs had the terrible idea to make you repair the coach while fighting, which essentially robs (randomly I might add) one of your heroes from their turn. You don't get to choose who. Who thought of this ♥♥♥♥?

Your heroes also have a new system where they'll like or dislike each other and this can completely screw you over (yay, more screw the player mechanics!). If two of your heroes, you know, the ones fighting together for survival against already dismal odds, decide they don't like each other, certain abilities will begin to debuff that specific character every time it is used. Cause you know, the best way to stay a live is to actively screw over the people you're fighting with.

One of the ways you influence this love/hate system is through choice encounters. You choose which hero gets to talk and sometimes the other heroes like it and sometimes they don't. This is also super unintuitive because sometimes the dialogue makes it appear like you've chosen not to ♥♥♥♥ with said thing but it still impacts you negatively or throws you into a ridiculous fight anyway.

The game warns you in the beginning that it is about "making the best of a bad situation" but this is really an understatement. It's more like, "come beat your head against a wall for a few completely hopeless runs to maybe get enough of a benefit so that you can do one decent one."

I really enjoyed the original for what it was. Sure, it was difficult, but building up a roster, and "making the best of a bad situation" were intuitive and not nearly as one-sided as this strange excuse for a sequel. If this game took out the terrible stagecoach and just focused on making choices on the map, it would already be 10x better. But between that, the nerf to healing, the buff to everything annoying about the first game, and the fact that it's more of a reimagining than a sequel, I cannot recommend this game at this time. And that makes me sad.

After 17 hours playing, I've only crashed 3 times. Actually really impressed with how well it runs given my ancient GTX1080 GPU, but I'm on high settings (no ray tracing or anything else fancy, obviously) at 1440p. I was honestly expecting a lot worse.

My biggest complaint is that the controls still feel fairly awful. There are so many times that button presses just don't trigger or worse, especially on those terrible grapple points. Some of the jumping situations force you to grapple multiple times but the LB indicator won't trigger unless the camera can see it. Well, the camera is firmly glued to the back of Cal's head all the time, making it super frustrating.

Combat is mostly fun, though I hate unrealistic things like high damaging shockwaves just because a monster stomped its foot. The lightsaber styles all feel fairly different but I don't like that I am forced to choose between just two. Ghost of Tsushima did this right and this feels like a step backwards here.

Billions of collectables and minigames, most are forgettable and uninspired. I still don't understand the point of the garden and the controls for it are kinda bad. The holotable battles are basically rock paper scissors with random chance added and it doesn't play like a game that would exist in the Star Wars universe but it's neat to be able to do something with the enemies you scan.

Customization is great, lots of cosmetics to find, VO is pretty good but NPC interactions aren't the best. Even your crew don't seem happy or surprised to see you at all when you pop back in after a long mission away.

Overall, pretty solid followup to the original. Lots to collect, lots to explore, fun puzzles but also a lot of half-baked features like mounts.


**BOSS MONSTER SPOILERS**

When fighting the Rancor, he does a couple of really stupid Stomp shockwave things that nearly one-shot you. Dumb stuff like this takes me out of an otherwise epic fight. You can make the rancor fun and scary without stupid gamey ♥♥♥♥ like this. Also, if he manages to grab you, it's an instant one-shot and he puts you in his mouth and crunches. While funny, there's a HUGE missed opportunity here. There are big bones laying all over the cave like the one Luke Skywalker shoved into Jabba's rancor's mouth. Let me force pull one of those up to stick in his face as a one-time escape method or something fun and iconic to Star Wars instead of just CHOMP YOU DED with no way to do anything about it.

I love the style of this map builder. It's basically Dwarven Forge Online at a tiny tiny fraction of the cost. The small but talented dev team have delivered on their promises thus far, making it an easy choice for my online games. Map building is as easy or as complicated as you want it to be and there are already several community sites with full maps that can be copy/pasted into your client (or with the latest update, added with the push of a button) to give you a beautiful map on the fly for when your players inevitably ruin all your well-laid plans and deviate. I cannot praise this program enough and I'm looking forward to seeing what else they do with it in the coming months.

TaleSpire is a one-time cost for the base game. There are no subscriptions to maintain access to anything but they team have hinted that they may sell asset packs in the future, which I have zero problems with. Since the Kickstarter ended, they've released tons of new assets at zero cost, I'm okay paying a few bucks for themed packs that work for my settings.

If you play fantasy RPGs online with friends, absolutely, 100%, pick this up for your group. Whether you build out a whole world for them to hop around and explore or just drop them into battle maps from time to time, it's a whole new level of fun and immersion.

A mere shadow of its former glory. Everything is faster than you, the dodge roll is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ worthless because things catch up to you and hit you before you recover from it while barely letting you get out of the massive mob of enemies that inhabit every room, every other room is 2-3+ spawners that take a million hits to kill and refresh monsters faster than you can hope to kill them, and very few options to increase your strength so it never gets better.

Much improved and still the king of Battle Royale!