NiOH 2 Review - a comprehensive and captivating, if dutiful continuation of a pioneering soulslike

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The Yokai shoulders.

An exciting, tense and well developed Samurai adventure that was disappointed with something too much recycling and some messy new systems.

The measure of a good soul-like is not the power of his (nameless) kings, but the tuning of his farmers. Ground opponents like ornstein and Smough could master the lion's share of the Youtube uploads, but they are or should not be things that they really fear. NOOH 2 offers many bosses, mostly from the gender-making areas of the Japanese folklore and all have the ability to relocate the procedure into the Yokai or ghosts, where their attacks are cruel - a refined variation of the idea of ​​the boss phases. My outstanding features include a massive EULENDEMON, which regularly turns off the light and forces her to pursue the creature on the basis of its bright red eyes. But in this great, albeit conservative and overloaded continuation of the mixture of Ninja Gaiden and Dark Souls from 2017, it's not really about the giants. It's about the dirty little bastards in the undergrowth, the simple grunts with tricks in the sleeve.

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Nioh 2 review

• Developer: Team Ninja
• Publisher: KOEI TECMO / SONY Interactive Entertainment
• Platform: Rated on PS4
• Availability: From the 13th of March on PS4

For example: They make a demon wiper whose skills belongs to a kind of arthritic spin attack, who dugs and swirls, as if he were trying to free themselves from a net. It is easy to handle and quite silly, older moment as a special train. Often it ends with the witch overlaps on a pile. But sometimes it ends with you throwing you a knife to the head. Elsewhere they meet bandits that are a slight prey until they will die, whereupon they make themselves out of dust and rings them to the ground, as well as deceptively polished Samurai, who spit demons that spit down the demons, which spit down the demons.

The worst, however, are the Gollum equivalents with the pot belly, which affects the Sengoku-Japan setting of the game, a world full of cherry blossom villages, pampered castles and torch-aas fields. It's not just that you are happy to play dead nearby. It's not just so that they spit out paralyzing fluid when they hit them too hard, or sometimes they accompany larger threats - stones bouncing off their skulls like unruly children when they do strokes that they kill them immediately. If you call a flat, another can overthrow themselves and devour what triples. They scurry out of range, and Hoppla, it turns out that one of these hare lurked behind them in a cabinet. These are the reversals that sound like soullikes, the moments in which no amount of levels, equipment bonuses, pathetic pleading or apoplectic rage can prevent them from dying 40 hours earlier through the very first enemy type they killed.

If NiOH is 2 full of such surprises, it's not a surprising sequel. The branding of Nioh 1.5 is too much, but this is definitely a case where the handle is decorated instead of switching the blade (counterfeiting nerds can turn on here with a more suitable comparison). It plays before the events of the first game and shows you as a hide, a tailor-made adventurer with Yokai blood - a property that you can use the skills of killed demons and can take Yokai-shape short. Already early fall together with a hiking ragamuffin, Tokichiro, who involves her in the search for glory and wealth.

The gaming is that they steer the secret history of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the real Daimyo, which is attributed to the union of a war-related Japan, which were actually two people in this post-counting. The true services of Hideyoshi belongs to confiscate swords from all over Japan and to melt them to a Buddha statue - a source of irony, as they will spend a large part of NiOH 2 to ask themselves how they have the worn equipment Dispose of your inventory. The first game was barely celebrated for his storytelling and the second offers a similar, wasteful but scattered mix of prominent, eccentricators and pantomimemanipulators. The dialogue and acting are tingling, but there is little narrative backbone. Ultimately, it is only a number of intermediate plays integrated into a campaign in which you select main and co-missions from a total monitoring view in the style of a total.

Recurring players find NiOH 2-Looks and handles mostly as they were, give or take some natural animations and a rich color palette. From Souls, Nioh derives the idea of ​​leaving your collected EP at the time of death to give you a single opportunity to restore you, along with moody, spiral levels held together by shrines full of friendly fences that restore you and restore you At the same time non-bosses revive enemies. Unlike souls, these are separately charged areas, but they are subject to similar emphasis on unlockable links. Most of them consist of three or four shrines near doors who need to be opened from the other side as soon as they fought there. The greatest geographical changes over Nioh are dark zones in which the border between the mortal and Yokai-Reich has collapsed. Shrines and treasure chests are forbidden here until they have cleaned the Midboss, who is responsible for the mental overflow.

Ninja Gaiden owes the game to his sophisticated melee system with dozens of weapon-specific combinations supported by Ninja tools such as poisoned shuriken, onmyo spells such as fireballs or lifestyles and nuclear options of their character. From the Waff Types - Ax, Katana, Double Blades, Switchgliave, Spear, Odachi, Tonfas, Kusarigama, Beil, Switchglaive - are only the last two new, and the rest recycles most of their combos, parades and specials from the first game. Each weapon can be used in three positions with different movesets: high attitude exchanges speed against force, low attitude force against speed and center is ... in the middle.

The supporting role-playing systems are essentially as before, but with much more meat. In addition to outputting Amrita or XP to improve statistics that meet the weapon types, and the assignment of points to the extensive unlocking tree of each weapon category, build familiarity with individual weapons, with which they can do more damage. This encourages them to master each individual instead of throwing it aside as soon as they find a rare specimen with higher basic skills - what happens to my experience about every few minutes. Add all the armor effects such as health regeneration if you fulfill your attacks with the water element, along with the bonuses you get through the choice of protective spirit. It's a lot to swallow, and that's before you start to combine your own equipment between missions and forging, to transfer bonuses to parent blades or disassemble them for parts.

A role player who is so headflatable needs something to catalyze the emotions at the moment. This thing is again Noth's smart redefinition of stamina as Ki, ​​the all-penetrating life energy from the traditional Chinese medicine and the martial arts. Swinging a weapon and you'll scatter Ki in the air, like sparks from a torch. If you exhaust the pole, you can not perform any action at all, not even the hanging punches that occur when emptying the tank into souls games. If you achieve a hit in this state, you will be stunned for a few seconds. This is the opportunity enough for just like any opponent to do it. So they do their best to keep the bar off - not only to retreat and drop their wake to get back, but to tap R1, while Ki leaves her body to suck him back.

In this way, puddles with Ki sapping statics are eliminated, which were summoned by demons. In particular, bosses spur this vampiric substance everywhere and force them to pulse these pulses or adhere to non-contaminated areas. Ki recovery is not as punitive as it sounds - if you have difficulty to introduce you to your COMBOS, there are unlocks that trigger KI pulses when you dodge or perform other routine actions. But the system gives her presence in this world a certain poetic charge. It's not just about having to come to breath so that you can beat someone with your ax, but also to align inner and outer equilibria, to become one with your environment - and beat someone with your ax while they are there.

The weapons themselves are a pleasure, whether they press enemies with the 12-foot blade of the Odori in the ground or wrap them in the chain of the Kusarigama. The new toys are not transformative, but have their share of deadly quirks: the breeurs can be thrown and returned by magic into their hands, while the Switchglaive (an allusion on Bloodborne) from a razor into a spacious rod weapon and a sense of messy Finisher. I am less convinced of the new Yokai skills that are equipped through the insertion of cores that were dropped from demons into their guards. The possibilities range from pulling a huge burning hammer from the bag to bursting as an imaginary ogere through the ground.

They make a lot of fun visually, but some are much more useful than others, and their tactical applications are dull - either they cause a lot of damage at once or try to stumble an enemy (or both). Demon corners also increase the pressure on their inventory, where I often emit helmets and rays on the roadside (a less wasteful way to lose weight, it is to exchange weapons in shrines against money). I also have mixed feelings regarding the new Yokai transformations that replace Nioh's living weapons. Each of the three Yokai shapes has its own weapons, a moveset and a burst counter that can be used against devastating attacks, which prevents boiling red lights. There is another level of skills here, but I mostly used transformations to spam out of corners or to do bosses that I could not scientifically assassinate.

In general, I feel that Nioh 2 is quite bloated quite bloated, a feeling that is reinforced in the course of the game if you spend less time with monsters, and spend more time to tame the hydraulic calculation equation that has a Character matching represents. I was dismayed when I found it 30 hours later that I had unlocked another level - one of these abstract clan battle modes in which they connect a faction and donate objects for passive bonuses. A man can get tired of passive bonuses, even if he is not timely. Controversial seems to have taken the place of the regular PVP, although this is offset by the advanced co-op options. You can now summon the Ki-controlled shadows of other players as opponents and allies - practical, if no one is online, which helps you through a boss fight, although the Ki is too unable to serve more than just as a distraction.

The more you play, the more they notice the project management structuring the levels. Each has its guiding idea, such as a central elevator or a network of dams that expose to looting river beds when lowering. However, the cadence of shrines and abbreviations, optional areas and boss chambers is the same everywhere, which slowly undermines the curiosity generated by the otherwise absorbent architecture of the game. In Dark Souls, the world is an interlocking puzzle. NiOH 2 are a series of devilish puzzle boxes. Certainly captivating and oppressive, but not so amazing or fascinating.

Therefore, maybe my joy, if I'm surprised by a grubbing spear leader in homemade armor. It is the dose of adrenaline, which requires a supersaturated game, like the discovery of a razor blade in her seventh pitch wedding cake. NiOH 2 is a work of immense skills and scope, but in the next project of Team Ninja, it has to be more about changing things than to add them. After all, she can not protect a lot of equipment fans from surprises.