Dark Deity 2

I probably picked this game up too soon after giving up on Dark Deity I. I made it through 10 levels, but playing the game felt like a chore every time.

The game play is actually better than the original, with multiple issues removed. Having a character die on a mission is no longer a big enough deal to restart a level, as they are only given temporary penalties instead of permanent ones. The endless cut scenes can now be skipped, even if there are still 5 or so to skip between each chapter. You can set your game to have predefined stat boosts instead of the ridiculous random ones from the original game. These changes are big enough for me to feel like I should upgrade from Dark Deity I’s 5 to a 6, but at the end of the day I can’t call this game solid and justify that rating. It looks like there are a bunch of critics who rate this incredibly highly on Open Critic, I’m just not one of them.

The tactical game play is fine. Missions have objectives, characters have some abilities, and in this version the unit abilities are often worth using. The real issue with the game play is that there might as well only be three classes – melee, ranged, and both. You use your ranged guys to attack melee units so they can’t counteract, and your melee guys to attack ranged units. The tougher units can counterattack from either distance, so you just use the special character abilities to target them. You can upgrade the difficulty to make this more challenging, but the lack of variety between characters makes the overall strategy mind numbingly simple.

This game really falls apart with the RPG elements, often one of my favorite parts of these games. Not only do you not have the ability to allocate stat points from level ups, you only get to choose a class upgrade at level 5 (early) and level 25 (super late) in the game. To provide some element of character creation, there are a few strange upgrade systems that I found so tedious that I barely engaged with them. You can put relics on your heroes if you collect certain gems and are willing to scroll through the useless options to find one that is potentially overpowered, and you can put upgrades on your weapons that might need to be removed and replaced. The gains provided from these systems seem way too small to justify the time to wade through the options, particularly with the simplicity of the actual battles.

There are a lot of brilliant tactical RPGs that still hold up, including Final Fantasy Tactics. There are a lot of great options that come out these days as well, this just is not one of them.