Text/Yangcheng Evening News all-media reporter Liu Kehong
Identification object: "Dark Dungeon 2"
Launch time: May 8
When the old man picked up the letterhead in his hand again, the low whisper echoed in his ears again, and the memory seemed to be thrown back to the past: teams of mercenaries with different configurations embarked on a journey to regain their homeland as if they were dead (rebellious at any time), relying on the fading torch in their hands to move forward with difficulty. Death is not the end either, and there will always be companions who will repeat this stressful journey.
On May 8, "Dark Dungeons 2" landed on the Steam platform and received "mostly positive reviews". The familiar dark style, more exquisite and three-dimensional modeling, and richer action details can indeed make players have a more realistic dungeon experience. But when a mercenary who spent a lot of effort to unlock the five memories was taken away by a knife and we sat in front of the computer beating our chests and bored, players finally found that the new training mechanism of "Dark Dungeon 2" made it a subversive core experience from the previous game: mercenaries are no longer a brushing tool, they have stories, memories, and relationships, which makes the experience of a journey more profound, but also makes multiple journeys a torture.
Dark Dungeons 2 is a rogue-like road trip with no return. In the game, we need to assemble a team to arm the stagecoach and ride across the decaying land. Unlike Gen 1 to build a base and train multiple squads at the same time, this game fixes the perspective on a single journey of a squad, and the mercenary class in the same journey is unique and non-renewable.
In the game, players need to constantly unlock the stories of these characters on a journey, improving their skills and characteristics. When a mercenary dies, players must also rely on the broken team to make it to the next checkpoint, replace an unlocked character that is completely different from the dead class, and continue to move forward. This also represents the complete end of the era when double thugs shot at close range, and double barbarians stabbed in series.
When all unlocked characters are killed or the team fails to make it to the next checkpoint, the journey will begin again, and in addition to updating the repaired carriage, the hero's skill upgrades and trait development will return to the original state, and the collected item trinkets will be zeroed, and the player will not be able to find more traces of the previous mercenary presence. They are like real people, the grave disappears to the edge of the road, and also buries the player's sense of accomplishment.
This kind of frustration experience is not made up for by the first generation of the first team killed and the second team dies, even if the character trained by the heart is accidentally killed, it can rely on the updated infrastructure to train faster and the tool people can compare. But often this experience is inevitable, because we must know that a trip will stall in the hands of a new boss that we have not explored mechanics. Conquering new bosses requires gradual familiarization of journeys. This often puts players in the dilemma of "insufficient forward momentum" and "unwilling to retreat".
The game's updated carriage running map mechanic, although the graphics are deep in the essence of the dark wind of the previous game, also have rogue-like elements of road selection. However, in the actual gameplay, it can be found that in the process between the two event trigger points, the player can only manipulate the carriage to crash some road materials to obtain mosquito-like supplies, and the traps and monsters in the journey have been determined as early as when choosing the route, and the exploration and surprise of different item interaction in generation 1 are missing. It's a chicken experience, even seriously off-the-top and slows down the game, and sometimes feels less coherent than being reduced to Killing Spire directly into different road events.
Overall, "Dark Dungeon 2" inherits the art style, dubbing, characters, and plot of the first generation, but there are trade-offs in team matching, town management, hero cultivation, and trinket collection. You can see the determination of the production team to reform the core gameplay of the game through the gradual change of the mercenary relationship in the journey, the gradual fullness of the mercenary story, and the uniqueness of the mercenary, but the effect is still debatable. Players must also abandon their impressions of the previous game and embark on a new journey, and suffer from repeated gameplay if they use mercenaries as tool people, or fail to enjoy the meticulous depiction of a single journey. (For more news, please pay attention to Yangcheng Pai pai.ycwb.com)
Source | Yangcheng Evening News Yangcheng Pie
Responsible Editor | Lily
Proofreading | Peng Jiye