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This is mostly a surface level review trying to avoid spoilers and give context for things I like/dislike. The TLDR is the game runs very poorly on PC (regardless of your hardware) and if you like Dragon's Dogma 1, you will probably like this game depending on what you are looking for.

So I'm one of those people that actually likes the story in the first game. I don't think it was executed well at all though for many reasons. One of those reasons being the idea of the Dragon and you not even partaking in activities related to facing the Dragon. In this game however I feel like they put more effort into the reasons behind the main quests and WHY you are spending time doing it. (There's still a feeling of some quests being "filler" and the pursuit of conclusions not solely focused on facing the Dragon as the Arisen). I still think the core idea of the story is great, but again the execution still fails in some key areas and most players are going to walk away from this game not really getting the whole point of the time they spent and what the point of it was. Overall the story is fine, good voice acting and compared to the first game there's a lot more focus on cutscenes and less awkward in-game sequences.

Like DD1 this game has an open world but unlike DD1 this open world is seamless. Even major cities and their interiors require no loading. To keep it short and simple, the first game was vast open fields with destinations in every corner of it but for the most part a very empty open world. In DD2 the world is MUCH more packed and dense, with more interesting caves and locations to visit. There's plenty of side quests to find which have multiple ways to be tackled. Overall as far as open worlds go it's not Elden Ring but it's a really good translation of the first game's ideas into a more realised version of itself.

The gameplay at it's core is fantastic, depending on the vocation you pick though it can really alter the way you will play and it can be very jarring for newer players. Here's where it falls apart for me though... The game as it stands right now has no difficulty options, and the game gets easy quite quickly (depending on skills used and vocation) but eventually the challenge completely disappears and every combat encounter can be quickly finished without much effort or planning. There is a max health reduction system in place which does kind of make exploring for long periods of time "harder" because your maximum heal-able HP will reduce over time, but that does not really change much considering you can just setup a camp and sleep overnight to go back to max HP. With camping kits also not expiring it also kind of just circumvents the max HP system anyway (Your camps might be attacked by nearby enemies when you rest, and your camp kit CAN be destroyed but after 120+ hours played it basically never happened and I can only assume it's because I would kill everything nearby naturally before setting up camp.) With the absence of a Hard mode and no Dark Arisen style expansion from DD1 I am left wanting for more of a challenge and I do hope a hard mode is added for the NG+ system kind of like a souls game.

So pawns are very interesting and quite unique in Dragon's Dogma and there's lots of new mechanics here to breakdown but I'll keep it simple. You have a squad of 3 pawns who act as followers who help you in combat and quests as well as exploration. 1 of those pawns you create yourself and the other 2 you can hire from an online system where other people's main pawn is usable in your own world where they gain knowledge which is transferable to their owners world. The whole squad can be whatever you like, everyone can be a thief or you can build your party in a more balanced way which will definitely make the game easier if you have a good mage in the party with buffs and heals. Pawns are both sometimes quite smart in attacking or sometimes will just walk off a cliff and kill themselves there's kind of no in between. You can issue them commands but it's mostly a let them cook kind of situation. There's a lot more depth to pawns here like specialisations that let them combine things from the inventory or heal you with items etc but basically it's overall just an NPC follower party system with some controllable depth. You can choose to play alone by killing your main pawn and not hiring any pawns or maybe you just want to play with 1 bro you make yourself as the main pawn, it's completely up to you. I find that playing alone with a main pawn and not having a healer in the party starts to make the game more challenging and to me, more fun overall.

This game, like the first, has a very abrasive carry weight system that basically means the more stuff you carry, the slower you move. You can increase your carry weight by making a taller and stronger character and by using a certain collectable item you find in the world. My main issue with this system is NOT that it exists, but the fact that healing items weigh next to nothing and you can spam them in combat. Like I said there IS a max HP reduction system but it doesn't really matter in the long run and overall you can even spam heal through death itself. This weight system to me, kind of has no purpose other than forcing you to turn in all your junk collected every now and then, which is fine. I don't particularly enjoy the system but it is what it is. I just wish in this game healing was less of a commodity and mages were more of the main healing source.

This game runs like ♥♥♥♥. There's no way to sugar coat it. CAPCOM are usually right on the money with their PC games and the performance is typically great on most systems. The RE engine is usually quite good across the whole spectrum of PC hardware.
Now I'm no developer and I have no idea about how making an open world on the RE engine has challenged the developers but for the price of this game the state it has launched in is unacceptable. For reference I have an AMD Radeon 7900xt GPU and an AMD Ryzen 7 7700x CPU playing games at 1440p 165HZ and for every single game I have played on PC Dragon's Dogma 2 is the worst performance-wise. If you have a better system than this chances are you are still running into problems related to frame pacing and frame drops. If you lock the FPS to 60 and just put up with the frame pacing in major cities the experience is less jarring but you need a very beefy CPU to achieve this, and the steam hardware survey doesn't lie, most people do not have that kind of system.

Now, speaking about MTX I'm gonna keep it short and simple... MTX = bad, we can all agree on that. Yet, the MTX in this game are useless, they are not changing the game as much as people make it out to be and frankly the only thing on the store that has a measurable impact is the DD1 classic soundtrack. (Please add Into Free -Dangan- CAPCOM wtf). CAPCOM have done WAY worse with MTX in their previous games and those games have insanely positive reviews, so I think most of this outrage is compounded with the bad PC performance and rhetoric from game journalists/gamers who misrepresent what the actual content of the MTXs are.

So yeah, I like this game a lot just like DD1 but I can't help but feel like it's missing the challenge that was offered from the Dark Arisen expansion from the first game. It makes improvements where needed and keeps the core of the game systems mostly intact. I think this game would be much improved for me IF they can add some sort of scaling difficulty and IF they add some sort of harder dungeon system akin to the Dark Arisen expansion from DD1.

Wait for a few years and get it in a deep sale, or go download it on gamepass if you already pay for it

I have no idea what I'm doing

I usually don't like playing early access games because of the lack of content, luckily for me this game doesn't suffer from that. Even when you've seem everything possible it's still massively enjoyable just... breaking the game and getting so many items everything on the map just dies in one hit.

The move from a 2D to a 3D perspective was something I wasn't looking forward to but actually playing it, I was really happy with how it turned out and it actually translated so well I genuinely enjoy this so much more than the first game.

Worth it for the price asked honestly, even if you just wait for more updates.

This review will be available in 3 days.

Rush for 50 Platinum?

In all honesty though there are games out there like this that you would pay full price for and get much less out of. DE have done a great job over the years making a nice steady comeback building up to this version of the game. I just wish it was more inviting to new players, it was a nightmare for me and my friends to learn certain things and I'm sure a few loading screen hints or resource warnings/tutorials would go a long way.

It's free, but it comes with the downside of having to wait if you want to craft things (which is fine honestly) you just need to get in the habit of crafting things way in advance so you always have some new weapons or Warframes to level up.

I've invested real money in this game equivalent to a full priced game and I think it's worth it if you get a platinum discount on the login screen, you can get yourself some weapon slots and Warframe slots. The nice thing about this game though is it has a nice trading community with ways of making platinum (the microtransaction currency) without actually paying for it, and it's not that hard either.

Just give it a go, it's great

It's been a really long time since I last played EDF game, and I heard bad things about the ones available on PC that came before 4.1.

but... This is the best EDF game I've ever played it's amazing, the combat, the guns, the vehicles... Everything is so much fun.

The visuals and everything else are about as terrible as it gets, but that really doesn't matter at all, because it's such a fun Co-Op game to play with friends splitscreen or online. The variety of guns is incredible, and after 12 hours of playtime I haven't even seen 10% of what's available.

Here's to killing bugs and having fun doing it!

it's pretty good

Okay so I've played lots of this game already, over 200 hours. I've 100% completed it, and I've done the same for all previous titles not including Demon's Souls because screw you Fromsoft and your Pure Bladestone.

So I'm a fan of the series, it's safe to say, and Dark Souls III hits the mark for me really well. If you liked previous titles and you want more of the same, this game has it, you will enjoy it no doubt.

My only complaints right now are small, and there's one huge issue with the game regarding online play. I'll get on to that after I talk about the game a little.


So I started the game with very little knowledge about what to expect, and I also started alongside a bunch of friends who also bought the game. We all played our first characters solo though, so we could get a better feel for the bosses and learn the game a bit better. Without spoiling anything, this game has fan service from previous titles, and some of it is purely there to get a reaction from returning players. That was kind of a disappointment for me, but as I played on and kept reading item descriptions, some of the returning locations/items/NPCs actually made sense within the world itself. For that, I was happy. The story this time around is again, more of the same, but that is not a bad thing. I love the rich lore in Fromsoft games and I love how much love is put into item descriptions and NPC dialogue, something which you can choose to ignore or dig real deep into it and learn all the secrets about the lore.


The bosses are amazing, I really enjoyed a lot of the bosses, with really only two of them lacking in my opinion.
I did not like the Wolnir or Deacons of the Deep boss fights. I didn't like Wolnir's mechanics but overall was a VERY cool boss in design and concept. I didn't like the Deacons either, because well, it's a typical Fromsoft multi-enemy boss fight.


The fact is (and no one likes admitting this) Fromsoft are bad at multiplayer. There's always issues surrounding the multiplayer and it's always been an issue in the previous games, and now this one. I'm not talking about balance and overall functionality, I'm talking anti-cheat and their stance on banning people. In Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition (the first game, on PC that is) had NO anti-cheat whatsoever, so cheaters where rampant and nothing could be done about it, other than playing kiss chase off of a ledge for the hacker to die from fall damage. Fromsoft were very unexperienced in PC titles and they did a bad job of Dark Souls 1. It wasn't terrible though, because the mod DSfix cured that game. Dark Souls II was the same, it had no proper anti-cheat. Except this time around it had soft bans. The way someone was selected for a soft ban is simple, they monitored the servers and players for any suspicious activity and if they spotted something out of place and they could confirm it to be cheating. You were soft banned, but... they didn't tell you that you had been banned and you had to email Bandai Namco just to find out if you were. Obviously this system has its flaws just like any other anti-cheat system, but the big problem is the hackers were still everywhere and softbans didn't really help.

Fast forward to the release of Dark Souls III and this game has had almost the exact repeated problems, except people are being softbanned for rediculous reasons, like playing in offline mode or picking up an item that they didn't know was cheated in using a third party program.

At least you get an error message when there's invalid data. All you have to do is use a backed up save. What if you don't? Enjoy playing offline.

To close out, all I'll say is it's the best Dark Souls to date, in my honest opinion. The issues regarding multiplayer can be solved over time, and once they are, this game will be a hell of a game.

TL;DR
The game is good. Has some multiplayer issues regarding softbans. Good lore. Good Bosses. I recommend.

This is a pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ business move on Daybreak's part and I suggest not buying the game on the sole purpose of not supporting things like this in the gaming industry.

Initial purchase of this game was to "gain entry" into early access, end goal was a Micro-transaction F2P game.

Now, there's 2 games, basically 2 game modes sold seperately (lol) and no F2P anymore. So basically, the devs are maximising profit. Everyone needs to get paid, everyone needs to take money home to pay the bills and eat. This takes it too far.

I loved this game until Almir bent us over and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ us in the arse