Review: Darkest Dungeon II (Nintendo Switch)

Darkest Dungeon II is a turn-based, dungeon crawler, rougelike where you form a party of four and ride a stagecoach into what’s left of the world in an apocalyptic landscape. This game was a good mix of difficult challenges and fun strategy without many bugs, so let’s get into it.

When you first open Darkest Dungeon II, you’re shown a brief disclaimer that basically states that the game is difficult. After that, you get a cutscene that explains the game’s basic story and lore—the world is at its end, and you, a scholar, recruit a band of survivors to help you make a trek up a dangerous mountain to defeat an eldritch monster that resides in the mountain, or die trying.

After this, you hop right into the game. The first thing you do is choose your heroes. There are fourteen heroes from which you select four for your party. You only start with four heroes, but you’ll unlock more as you play.

There are two main parts to the game: the stagecoach and fighting. In the stagecoach, you drive across the land and choose paths to take while running into encounters, fights, and obstacles. The stagecoach is a little difficult to control, as the slightest movement of the joystick will throw the stagecoach from side to side. At the end of each area, you reach an Inn where you can heal your heroes and have them build bonds with each other which will help them out in and out of battle.

It’s during the fights that your choice of heroes matters. They have different stats that make them better or worse at certain things. Movement stats determines their place in the combat order. Each hero can have five moves at a time, and you can unlock more moves that you can change in between battles. The combat can be kind of complicated, but, fortunately, the game has built-in tutorials for every aspect, not just the combat. Besides that, the combat is just downright difficult sometimes. Random number generation can really screw you over in Darkest Dungeon II, so be wary of that.

Outside and within combat, each hero can acquire stress. Stress goes from 0-10. At low levels of stress, not much will happen. At higher levels, however, you’ll start to see some negative banter between the heroes. This will cause your heroes to not like each other as much and cause problems in and out of battle. Once heroes reach stress level 10 there is an 80% chance they will have a meltdown and a 20% chance they will be resolute. Meltdowns debuff the hero and make the other heroes like them less. Becoming resolute does the opposite and heals the hero, buffs them, and makes the other heroes like them more.

Darkest Dungeon II’s graphics are absolutely amazing. The game does an great job of contrasting 2D pictures with 3D models, and it looks beautiful. From the 2D characters and their attacks to the 3D stagecoach and 3D world outside of combat. Everything just fits so well together and is animated together so perfectly. I especially like the gloomy colors used to depict the wasteland of what’s left of the world.

The audio is also very enjoyable. The music isn’t repetitive, and each area is well represented by sound effects. While there isn’t a lot of music, it shifts into different songs after about a six-minute loop. This makes it so fights don’t go stale and are that much more intense and fun.

There was only one bug that I came across in the game and I don’t even know how it happened. While in a fight, the tutorials opened and I was unable to close them no matter what I did. No buttons worked, and it wouldn’t go away until I closed the game and reopened it. Again, I don’t know how it happened, but it’s a highly destructive bug that may cause you to restart a very good play-through.

Darkest Dungeon II is very fun. The graphics and audio are astounding, and the gameplay, while frustrating at times, still makes for a fun and enjoyable experience. When paired with the expertly written story, it makes for a great game. If you like the challenge of rougelites and roguelikes, this game is for you.