Very entertaining game with solid gameplay and good writing. There is a lot of combinations of characters, abilities, power ups, and crafting that allow for some replayability. The main story is short, but with the DLC you should get about 10 hours for total completion. Definitely recommend picking up the full edition with the DLCs. I did enjoy the first KoPP better, but this is a good game worth checking out.

I played Knights of Pen and Paper +1. I enjoyed it, despite a feeling that it was grindy and slow toward the end. I enjoyed it enough that I bought the deluxe edition of #2 immediately when I saw it, without a second thought.

The depth is improved, but I did not enjoy the game overall.

Main faults:

- Applying conditions is combat is not rewarding. Enemies (and your own characters, for that matter) have a high base chance to entirely negate a condition every single round. There is no way to impact that chance at all.
- Compounding the above, there is a whole set of items, accessories, and skills that center around conditions that are consequently also not rewarding.
- Difficulty is under-tuned. You'll outpace the level of your enemies very quickly and are unlikely to fall behind unless you eschew side quests completely.
- Nothing to spend gold on - Stores only stock "common" items and enchantment scrolls, item progression caps out early-mid game. Soon you'll be drowning in gold with maxed out items, spending all your money on XP shrooms in a desperate bid to see if there's just one more tier of stuff to buy
- Dungeons barely vary from regular gameplay, if you have scarab of energy + cleric you won't even notice the inability to rest, but the cheap and plentiful consumables will also see you through.
- Area based "investigation" for extra items is excruciatingly boring.
- Bland. KoPaP 1 had chunks in it. Hard encounters that forced you to find more effective party and item builds, in order to defeat them.

Here's what's good:

- The humour of the writing and sheer quantity of geek references scattered through the game

EDIT: I toned down my review a little after trying +1 to remember what I liked and disliked. In many ways KoPaP 2 is an improvement, it's just let down by a lack of any interesting challenges to drive the rest of the gameplay.

Definitely doesn't hold a candle to the first one, but it's still playable. After a while the meta of "lol the DM is too lazy to think up good content" gets really old and feels like a flimsy cover for why the game is a bit shallow. The writing ain't great, too meme-y and not really that funny. I get that games want to be relevant to their audience, but when references are basically shotgunned everywhere it just doesn't feel like a smart narrative. There's no real depth to the characters beyond one-liners and it kinda feels like slogging through the back-catalogue of Questionable Content.

Pros-
It's short, so if the constant dankness irritates you it'll be over quickly, sorta.
I like the investigate system though the rewards were mostly useless.
I like how secrets are unlocked - but I wish an achievement was tied to how many you find so you know if any are left.
There's good synergy between the classes
It's not a *bad* game, it's just the first one really makes you want more and this doesn't live up to that desire.

Cons-
Writing feels dispassionate and like the devs maybe didn't care very much.
Balancing is non-existent
No point to getting special equips because you can't upgrade them. You're stuck with vendor items the whole game.
Dungeons are not fun at all
The game baits you into buying DLC and email signups which is super ♥♥♥♥♥♥

So, let me preface this with the fact that this is a very short game. It took me about 10 hours to complete, and that is with creating 2 parties first before settling on my 3rd and favorite party (so far) which I completed the main storyline and DLC content with.

Now that I have that out of the way, let's discuss the game itself. KoPP2 is the successor to the original game (if that somehow wasn't obvious.) It borrows the base mechanics from its predecessor, but expands quite a bit. Each character now has 3 primary governing stats, Mind, Body, and Senses. You often make party based stat rolls (d20 based, of course) out of combat. As part of this system, each player, class, and race (there are races now, cool, right???) contributes towards the stat scores.

The gear system is a significant upgrade from the original, allowing actual crafting rather than buying unending grindstones and improving existing gear. There is also a much broader variety of gear, allowing you to outfit each character to your liking.

Now, for the only "negative" I have for this game. This game will never be hugely popular, unfortunately, and that is due to the simple fact that the target audience is pretty small compared to that of other video games. It is marketed at tabletop gamers who are ALSO fans of lighthearted comedic games. **If you don't play tabletop roleplaying games, you will not get many of the jokes.**

Overall, dispite the disappointing length (made up for by the replayability brought by experimenting with different party make-ups) I'd highy recommend this game.

8/9 out of 10.

So you are looking at all those positive reviews and you may thing. Wow so much positivity I should get this. Though it does have old school 1 off lines and RPG tongue and cheek humor it isnt going to sustain you much past 30 hours of game play. Go ahead and look at the time played for all those reviews and know in your heart heart that some people left the game running while going to make a sandwich.

What I am saying is is $20 going to be worth a likely 11 hours of interaction with a VERY repeated battle system. Like repeated battle system in the way final fantasy is with out the story line.

Did i recommend the game? I did. Im willing to spend $20 for two hours of repetitive stilted combat that pulls me away from another game. Im just giving you a heads up.

So... the game is good fun. The story had me facepalm a lot in a good way and it was very interesting, I enjoy games that don't take themselves too seriously. The game mechanics were fine, no real problem at all.

What I really didn't like is the fact that a Free-to-Play version of this game exists, a version that is slightly more updated but is full of microtransactions and is an awful lot harder than this version: all values in the F2P version have been multiplied roughly by 20 compared to the Paid version, except the gold and experience gains which are lower still, so the progression is significantly hindered.
This version is incredibly easier, just consider that I didn't lose once and had a single character die two times at most, I could afford being wasteful since farming gold back was not an issue at all. Whereas in the F2P I got stuck halfway through the story, always broke and having to grind to no end, and even had my party wiped out quite a few times, effectively coming to a full stop.
The F2P version has slightly more items and is somewhat more refined anyways, so you would have the feeling of missing out if you limited yourself to this version; but on the other hand the F2P cannot be enjoyed fully because of how difficult it is compared to the Paid version.
I suspect - and I'm not the only one - that the publisher wants to grab as much money as possible from the F2P version, or to bring more people to buy the Paid version. Not that I regret getting the game, since I liked it, but I believe this is really not a good way to captivate the userbase as well as potential new users.

In conclusion...
If anybody asked me if they should buy it, I would recommend them not to bother.

KoPP2 is not a bad game, just very... mediocre. It feels and plays like a cool indie from Kongregate that's supposed to play for three hours—and three hours of relative fun is what I got out of it. Then it became a repetitive grindfest with enemies becoming spongier, but offering little new challenges.

(Full disclosure: I only got my characters to level 18, so if anything changes later on, my review will not reflect that.)

With each class only having four skills, all available from the start, there's just not much to do after you've discovered the combination that suits your playstyle best. New classes get unlocked too slowly to add variety. There are too few items and enemy types. Animations are unskippable, so one can say that Ninja's OP Smoke Bomb is balanced by you having to watch up to five separate stun animations each time you cast it. All in all, a couple of hours in, you just stop having fun with it; all that remains is going through the motions.

There's also something wrong with the balance; it's very tough to lose even a "hard" battle, and the only situation where you need to heal with items is in a dungeon that throws ~10 fights at you while not allowing to rest... which in all other cases you can do for free and seemingly indefinitely, bacisally allowing you to face each new challenge with a fresh party.

The presentation is up to your personal taste—it definitely achieves what it was aiming for. Personally, I mostly find the overly referential humor cringy and unpleasant (and while there's nothing wrong with using real-life stereotypes, choosing between a "jock" and a "cheerleader" is not my cup of tea). But tastes differ.

However, whether you like the humor or not, the writing is definitely nowhere near so good that it should take up such a big part of the game. Oddly enough, KoPP2 has way too much dialogue. Once again, there's nothing wrong with a witty one-liner or a small subplot, but long-winded 15-speech-bubbles-long scenes are hardly the reason why people picked the game up—so why add them?

Despite all that I said, KoPP2 is still not a bad game. It would suit the mobile market well, offering some sweet mindless clicking to a commuter. But for PC, it would have been much better if it was much shorter but denser, even for the same price tag.

I mourn the fact that in the current market many developers are scared of making shorter games—even when they only have enough content for such.

If you are an olde timer gamer, like me = age 49, then you remember playing D&D w ur nerd buds in 7th-9th grade.

This game is pretty awesome if you enjoyed those days. The DM has crazy wit n jokes for days. The team you assemble all have unique personalities. Combat plays out turn based w initiative, as well as several dmg effects.

After 14 hrs I have taken my main party to lvl 28s. The amount of humour and pop culture jokes is very cool. Kinda like watchin a George Carlin concert. Random funniness done well!

For $8 = a great deal, but catch it on sale for a real steal.

CONS - if you are under the age of 20-25, this game may seem slow, stupid, and unexciting. If you like to read, and you have a good imagination, then this game soars.

Probably limited replay value.

SCORE
I have recently unlocked several new character classes, and have some low level quests still available. Pretty cool bonus.

I will be buying the $5 dragons dlc once i finish milking the base game. Definitely worth the money for an engaging, fun time.

Well done, Kyy Games, a great product.
10/10

Short answer: It's about the grinding, and not meant to be binged. Great for short play sessions and it's not all that punishing.

Long answer:
This is completely about grinding in slow turn-based format, if you don't enjoy that-- you will not enjoy this game.
That being said, It's great to play for an hour or two at a time, because you're taking part in an activity that's meant to be consumed that way.
It never takes itself seriously, you can respec your entire party at the cost of a fair amount of gold, and it's got a surprising amount of content-- granted that the content is behind grinding walls.

It's well worth $8, and on sale it's an even better deal. So if you like the days of yore, and bite-sized grinding activity, I wholeheartedly suggest this.

I was actually going to recommend this game, probably even suggest getting the deluxiest edition, but after playing the mobile version of the game for the past couple days I only have one question;

Why does the free version have more content than the paid version?

Sure the mobile version has some of the freemium nonsense we all know and love from mobile games like paid currencies & microtransactions, but it has more features, better progression, a better difficulty curve, and additional items/weapons/gear.
More importantly, I was pretty disappointed when I found out that the PC version isn't cross-compatible with the mobile version. Of course now I know why since they're not even the same game. But I would've enjoyed it so much if I could have taken my PC save on the go with me and continued to progress the story and level my characters while I was out and about. But I guess that's just too good of an Idea I suppose.