Dragon's Dogma 2 feels very similar to the original, for better and worse

Don't go into Dragon's Dogma 2 expecting it to feel massively different from Dragon's Dogma or Dark Arisen. Despite the dozen years since the original game's launch (Dragon's Dogma 2 is set to arrive for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in early 2024), there's no huge change in gameplay, while the visual style of Capcom's fantasy RPG series also feels familiar.

The game's open world is way more dense in terms of flora and fauna, but its presentation remains similar to that of the original - with its grey, green, brown colour palette used in almost every game released in the early 2010s. And while this was a pre-release build, it did also suffer performance-wise on PS5, with what felt like big frame rate drops during busy battles. I also witnessed a variety of weird bugs involving NPCs and enemies - albeit things that trended towards the funny, meme-worthy side of glitches rather than anything game-breaking.

The original Dragon's Dogma also felt rough around the edges, so seeing these kinds of things in its sequel almost felt in keeping with the series. Dragon's Dogma 2 feels almost like a chaos simulator, where you wander its living world constantly being attacked by a variety of mythical beasties and shouted at by random NPCs. Your three AI pawns run around doing half-wacky and half-actually helpful stuff as they chatter incessantly with you and each other.

All in all, the game felt at times sloppy and confusing, yet also familiar and quite frankly, very entertaining. It felt like putting a bomb under a nicely laid out set of dominos, where your carefully laid plans can explode into utter pandemonium. I really loved how unpredictable each encounter was and how the game kept its basic 'go here, kill these monsters' questlines feeling fresh and full of laughs and surprises.

One big and highly appreciated improvement that has been made to Dragon's Dogma 2 is the seamless movement around the game's open world map, that's said to be four times the size of the original. But don't take my word for it - see it below in my hands-on video, which has even more detail on what you should (and shouldn't) expect to get up to.