#Stickman warriors heroes 2 review series#

You can stick with a class you really like throughout the whole of the 30 to 35-hour campaign, or spend some time doing sidequests to build up skills across a bunch of different classes and switch between them as needed. Earning skill points and improving weapon proficiency in different classes lets you customize character abilities, and additional skills and buffs can be learned through mastering weapons. There’s little here that’s truly new and noteworthy, but there are some nice new improvements to the way your characters develop.įor starters, your two main characters eventually earn the ability to change classes, which gives them access to different weapons and fighting skills and allows you to choose how they fight. If you’ve played a Warriors game before, you’ll know what to expect in terms of the combat in Dragon Quest Heroes 2: big, flashy combos that mow down lots of little enemies at once, special skills unique to each character, and big attacks you can use after you’ve been fighting for a while that will absolutely devastate the battlefield. There's little in combat that's truly new and noteworthy. These numerous long stretches of non-action in the middle of action portions tested my patience more than even the tankiest beasts I went up against. One particularly egregious portion has you trotting across the whole of a town multiple times to identify a monster masquerading as a soldier, forcing you to run around and chat up a bunch of boring NPCs over and over until you finally get a few scraps of the fighting you crave. Things like teleporter puzzles and switch puzzles plopped in between fights bring the sense of action and tension to a screeching halt. The problem is that what might work in a slower-paced, menu-driven RPG doesn’t translate well to a hack-and-slash game built on fighting enemy hordes constantly. It’s clear that inspiration was taken from traditional RPGs when coming up with some of the obstacles and objectives in these sections: things like poison marshes, castle mazes, and red-hot damage floors come from decades of RPG tradition. These include the usual Warriors-inspired missions where you canvass a large battlefield and mow down hundreds of enemies, but also big boss fights, maze-like dungeons, protection missions, raids on enemy territory, and even a bit of stealth. There are a lot of different objectives in the critical story missions, as well. It's clear that inspiration was taken from traditional RPGs. It helps that it looks good, too: the environments are distinct and lively, and both the characters and iconic Dragon Quest monster designs are lovingly rendered to look better than ever before. You also progress through areas like towns, forests, fields, and swamps much like you would in a traditional RPG, battling your way from destination to destination in a way that feels very natural. Rather than just hopping from mission to mission from a hub or menu, there’s a semi-open world you can explore at your leisure, once you've unlocked each region. The flow of the moment-to-moment gameplay has been changed to more resemble the role-playing adventures that inspired it. The story’s not the only thing that’s seen an improvement.

#Stickman warriors heroes 2 review series#

Characters from other Dragon Quest games will also pop in throughout the course of the story, and as a longtime fan of the series seeing familiar favorite characters appear and join my merry adventuring band was quite a treat, even though the story focus remains squarely on the all-new Dragon Quest Heroes 2 cast.

The characters it introduces are likable, the storyline – though somewhat predictable – kept me wanting to see what happens next, and the top-notch English localization added a lot of life and humor to both crucial story scenes and incidental dialogue. The story’s a marked improvement over the weak, 'Oh no, the monsters are evil now' plot of the first Dragon Quest Heroes, and it develops in interesting ways. As they adventure forth, they meet new friends and unravel evil conspiracy to bring all of the world’s kingdoms to war and fulfill an ancient prophecy. While it improves on the original in some ways, it stumbles a bit in the quest to transition Dragon Quest from its RPG roots into an action game.ĭragon Quest Heroes 2 begins with the lead characters, a pair of cousins, suddenly thrust into a surprise conflict between two formerly peaceful kingdoms. Now, Square Enix and Koei-Tecmo have teamed up again to deliver another monster-mashing, magic-slinging, army-crushing action-adventure in Dragon Quest Heroes 2. When Dragon Quest Heroes hit the scene in 2015, it delivered a solid mashup of two very different genres: classic RPGs and hack-and-slash action.