Franchises like Prince of Persia and Assassins’ Creed were dominating headlines, and gamers couldn’t get enough of that sweet blend of action and narrative development.Īnd, to a certain degree, Lince Works has succeeded in its endeavor. Aragami 2 is their attempt to harken back to an era when stealth-action games were the pinnacle of game development. While the sequel has taken a big shift in direction from what the first game promised, at the end of the day it’s just as much of a flawed yet impressive stealth game as the original.Aragami 2 is the latest game from Spain-based developer and publisher, Lince Works. It’s the kind of comfort food game that lacks polish and variety, but still ends up being a surprisingly fun time in short bursts.
HItman levels can take upwards of an hour to experience and I don’t always have time to invest into a fully linear, narrative-driven stealth game – but taking 20-40 minutes to do a couple of simple and satisfying Aragami 2 missions? I can handle that. On the other hand, it’s kind of an incredible game to take small bites out of every now and then. Repetitive missions, repetitive environments, and repetitive enemies make it hard to enjoy extended sessions in Aragami 2. Due to the clunky AI, you can often just run away and hide in a corner after being caught to avoid combat and reset the enemy alert meters. There are fun ideas like parrying and sword-clashing at play, but it all feels a little muddy and unpolished. When you’re spotted in Aragami 2, you enter combat. The repetitive enemy design adds an extra wrinkle to the discomfort of failing stealth. Enemies and environments are just as repetitive – you’ll return to the same maps multiple times, and encounter the same humanoid blade-wielding guards for pretty much the entire run of the game. Mission objectives are far too basic and repetitive, and without a strong narrative purpose, it’s hard to get excited about nameless assassination contracts and generic supply gathering missions. Monster Hunter makes sense because of the endlessly repeatable nature of your task to hunt huge monsters, and other hub-oriented games justify the repetitive job-search with unique missions or threads of narrative tying sets of missions together.Īragami 2, struggles to justify the unstructured experience. The structure apes off Monster Hunter, but it’s hard to feel like it’s warranted. Grab a mission, hop into the shadow-teleporter-thing and get whisked away to a standalone environment in order to complete your objective and escape unharmed.
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The sequel is set in a small hub village, where you upgrade your abilities, customise your armor, and then snag missions from a job board. The variety of stealth tools at your disposal help break up the monotony of the new gameplay loop in Aragami 2, which might come as another surprise to fans of the original. Underneath it all, the fundamental stealth gameplay remains, and it’s easily the most satisfying part of the game. A generic distraction whistle that alerts nearby enemies can be upgraded to target specific guards, or a temporary smokescreen can become a permanent smoke-emitter deployed at any lanterns on the map.
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You can unlock a series of base perks with useful properties, and then dump a few extra skill points into each perk to upgrade them and their abilities.
A few core abilities from the original – like creating shadows in your environment to act as movement markers and hiding spots – have been removed in favour of mixing a larger skill tree of more versatile abilities into the game. Narrative and character development are much less of a focus in this sequel, so while the light story elements tie into the new open-ended nature of the gameplay loop and make it easy for anyone to hop into the game, it’s sure to be a disappointment for any existing fans of the series.Ī lot of the core gameplay of the first Aragami carries forward to the sequel, but it’s been remixed, expanded and altered in a lot of ways. There are a few interesting ideas established throughout the 15-hour campaign of Aragami 2, but don’t expect them to get explored or fleshed out in a satisfying way. Set a century after the first game, it tosses the protagonist of the original into an entirely new world where shadow-inflicted citizens of a small village are at risk of being decimated by an invading clan of warriors. There’s no need to catch up on the story of the first game before diving into Aragami 2.
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