Super disappointing. The way the devs had described the game prerelease had gotten me quite excited. But, in the end, despite the goal of wanting to create a rich, reactive world that rewarded player agency, I found it to be more limiting and far too repetitive for my liking. Cool monster fights and nice graphics aside, there was little to latch onto for me to consider continuing onto the end game. Having to deal with the same batch of reskinned enemies, a bland world, and uninspired, still too hand-holdy, quests just burned me out way too early, which is unfortunate.

they put crack in this game. the first 30 or so hours were magical, nothing but going from point a to point b and fighting generic fantasy enemies on the way but with some of the most solid gameplay and feel out of any AAA ARPG i think i've played in a while.

by the end though it felt like the amount of world to explore and quests to do ran out long before my hunger for more of this game did, culminating in me getting to the very end of the game (before the post-game) and going "wait, that's it??", and i ended up exploring every corner of the world map thinking i had missed something, and unfortunately ran out of energy to move on to the post-game.

i WILL eventually play it, though i might wait until more content is added or i gain the motivation to again.

A game about rediscovery, about walking the same road over and over again and still finding new things to enjoy about it. Dragon's Dogma 2 finally fulfills the promises made by the first and delivers an all time open world RPG, one that justifies it's open world in a way so few games can manage. This is a game where an oxcart ride can lead to a week-long rivalry with a single griffin, where a fight with said griffin can lead to a frantic minotaur chase through the forest in the dead of night. Then, after dozens of hours of walking the same roads over and over again, the game world turns on it's head and asks you to prove your knowledge of those paths, to show your ability to simply travel from one location to another in an ending sequence that, while it lacks the surprise and novelty of the original game, more than makes up for it in sheer spectacle. Dragon's FUCKING Dogma 2 !!!!!!!!!!!

Fun game overall, some nitpicks: Wish there was more enemy variety, less but larger encounters. Higher difficulty would have been nice, any kind of hard mode. Dungeon variety was one of my biggest gripes. Trickster should have been a pawn accessible vocation, not very fun for an Arisen imo. Story could have been waaay better, feels like it was rushed.

Pros: Exploration is still great, and even better than the first game. Gameplay was improved on compared to the first game for me, vocations as a whole were a blast. Decent spread of towns, though I wish a few had a reason to revisit. Overall still had the DD appeal.

I may update this rating after/if the eventual expansion DLC comes out, in case it changes base game any like Dark Arisen.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 offers everything the first game offered: A beautiful open world to explore that has secrets and loot after every corner. Massive enemies to conquer with a battle system somewhere between Monster Hunter and Devil May Cry that is just super fun to engage with. A clever pawn system where you travel with up to three NPCs, one of your own creation and two from other players that can be hired and dismissed at will. Tons of weapons, armour and skills to play around with. No hand holding and a significant lack of modern quality of life features which makes the “adventure” part of the game shine even more. Because you actually have to plan your travels and can get into bad situations if you are not careful enough or badly equipped. And still, even when this game nails all these points and is very true to the original I left a tiny bit disappointed. Because while being very true to the original it doesn’t feel like a fully fledged sequel but more like a reimagination of the first game. It doesn’t help that almost every enemy type is known from the first game as well. And they didn’t even use all the old enemies and only added a few new ones. I also liked the more focused nature of the endgame of the original more. And there is nothing in Dragon’s Dragon 2 like Bitterblack Isle - the DLC Mega-Dungeon of the first game. Still, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an amazing game that runs circles around most modern open-world RPGs and an absolute must-play for every RPG- and fantasy fan.

Combat

The highlight of the game. Love switching between the different classes and exploring new playstyles. Climbing enemies & exploiting their weaknesses is fun as always.

Difficulty

The game starts off challenging. However, later on it is very easy to become OP. There are some classes that are absolutely broken. Towards the end game I felt all the challenges were gone. There is no need to “git gud” in this game.

New Game Plus

Kinda useless because it doesn’t seem like enemies scale and you are so OP. Only good for exploring the other endings, quests you missed out on and grinding. Could have been thought out better.

Narrative

Weak as hell. An incoherent mess.

Side Quests

Some are great. Most are very forgetful and super janky/unpolished.

Performance

I played on PS5 and it was fine. Some slowdown in towns but it was not game breaking for me.

Microtransactions

Yeah they exist but they are useless and you can ignore them.

Enemy Variety

So weak. A damn shame.

Music

Highly forgetful. At least it is chill and ambient most of the time.

Exploration

I feel like it is not as good as hyped up to be. Like yeah there’s a lot to explore but its also very repetitive and gets dull after a while. Running through the same long routes over and over again gets boring real fast.

Pawn AI

Hate it. They always die for the most janky reasons. The inclinations are a nice touch tho.

UI

The equipment/inventory UI is very dated but passable. The map UI might be the worst I have ever seen. Good luck finding your cursor as it seems that the design department never learnt about color contrasts.

Art style.

The 3D animations are fine. It’s the colors I have a problem with. Color theory was never adhered to or understood.

Overall, a big step up from the first game. However it is still a bugged janky unpolished mess. Looking forward to seeing if they fix these issues in DD3 to create a true masterpiece.

Gameplay-wise? This game rules, I have very little complaints. Exploring and fighting feel amazing here. I loved just running down paths I've never been down before just to see what lied at the end of each of them. But the story leaves a lot to be desired. The pacing is pretty bad in my opinion. The last act of the game is extremely rushed, and I entered the final mission without even realizing it. It was kind of a bummer, since I wanted it to be a bit longer. In fact, I kind of feel the amount of quests in this game in general was lacking, I feel like there should have been double the amount there actually was.

Also, one thing that I REALLY didn't like was during the postgame, there was a chain of quests that I didn't do in the correct order despite the game indicating there was no such cutoff. As a result, a quest I had open automatically cancelled and there was no alternative. It really soured an otherwise solid postgame area.

Fell off this one before I could get to the end. Really wanna come back to this when they fix the performance issues and maybe drop the equivalent Dark Arisen type expansion.

Really mixed on this. The original DD was this inspired but jank and unfinished masterpiece. It was this peek into an impossibly ambitious game that broke so many traditional rules of triple-A RPGs at a time when other games were playing it so safe. This one? Well, it's sort of the the exact same janky unfinished game and now it's competing with a gaming landscape that's got a lot more going on.

I'm a little disappointed, I can't lie. The promise of this game was 'Dragon's Dogma but finished' and instead we got 'Dragon's Dogma, but bigger, and still unfinished' and that really sucks. It still takes a lot of really cool interesting swings but they're just not as novel a decade later when now there's so many indie RPGs and even big Fromsoft games doing things just as interesting.

Dragons dogma é em sua essência um jogo que fica em te entreter com combates constantes e paisagens maravilhosas, se você está interessado em embarcar nesse jogo esteja preparado para bons 20~50 minutos de caminhada no início do jogo, e uma dica sempre que possível deixe pontos de viagem rápida as pontas do mapa, da pra você ir de carroça de forma rápida entre as grandes cidades do jogo, o que ajuda bastante, mas não é tão fácil quanto usar as pedras barcas.

No geral

Gráfico: 8/10
História 7/10
Gameplay (PS5): 9/10
Combate: 9/10

No geral recomendo pra quem curte action RPG, me passou muito a vibe de explorar Elden ring, a lore não é tão densa quanto Elden ring mas é um game na mesma pegada.

Curti muito!

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an example of a game that has received far too little love from the creators. At the same time, this game could have become a cult classic, because the idea and presentation of the game world is really good. However, the fact that so many elements were not finished or badly designed at the stage of preliminary assumptions shows how poorly the creators know today's gaming realities and the needs of players. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game that I finished and platinumed with pleasure, even though there were many problems, because there is really something to explore, but I will never play it again. It's just not a very nice thing to do when a game costs PLN 300 and even if you don't look at the microtransactions (which, by the way, I never felt I had to buy anything during the game), it's just blatantly obvious how little the creators were involved in the production of the game. And it's not even that it lacks polish and can be fixed with a patch, the problems are often design-related, deep in the game's code and can't be fixed. In the age of such productions as Baldur's Gate 3, or the previously mentioned Skyrim and Mass Effect, releasing a game like Dragon’s Dogma 2 by a major studio for that price is simply a shame. All that remains for Dragon’s Dogma 2 is to kiss the feet of good RPGs, because it will never stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

Full Review:
https://bigbaddice.pl/dragons-dogma-2-recenzja/