Nioh 2 - Complete Edition Review @ COG

COGconnected checked out the Complete Edition of Nioh 2:

Nioh 2: Complete Edition Review

After just under a year of waiting, Nioh 2  is finally out on PC, and a complete edition to boot! This souls-like action RPG is definitely a worthy predecessor, improving on almost every aspect of the already excellent original. If you are not familiar with the franchise, the game’s system is complex in a drastically different way from the From Software classics, so don’t expect just another souls-like clone!

Even More Complex Combat

Nioh already felt among the most complex souls-likes out there, and Nioh 2 only adds more. I don’t also mean to say the word “complex” as an objective positive, but something that I think comes down to individual tastes. The Dark Souls franchise feels like an exercise in minimalism, where they push its deceptively simple controls to its beautiful limits. Nioh, on the other hand, is a show of extremism where they stack systems over systems while somehow maintaining its impressive balance.

The combat is more than just managing stamina and health bars. One of the seemingly minor changes that impact the game’s flow in a drastic manner is how you recover your stamina. After every combo, a well-timed ki pulse will regain you a huge chunk of the stamina you used to either keep on the offensive, or to switch to the defensive more safely. This system teaches the player to stray away from button-mashing and to play the game in a more methodical, rhythmic way, where knowing your combos by muscle memory will increase your potential by tenfold.

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Nioh 2 is an excellent game on PC and if you were a fan of the first one, this is a must-buy. If you haven’t played the original, I hope the review gave you a sense of what the game is like. Are myriad of complexities in action games something that gets you excited or do they sound like needless distractions? I personally lean more to the minimalist side, but when a game pulls off its mechanics as well as Nioh 2, I don’t mind diving in once in head-first.

Score: 85/100