An open-world survival game that hits the ground running and barely lets you pause to breathe.

I remember many years ago when the first Dragon’s Dogma was released. This was around the time when Skyrim had just come out, and open-world games with magic systems, dragons, and different character classes were at their height (and still remain at quite a lofty peak!).

I sadly didn’t get hold of the first game until much later when better games with better graphics and more content were released. Although I did enjoy my experience with the game, as punishing as it was for a casual gamer. Though this was the time of open-world fantasy, Souls-like games were not quite as established as a genre unto themselves as they are today. Perhaps it took society moving on for me to recall this first game more fondly. To play Elden Ring and realize Souls-like games could be incredibly fun and rewarding when leaving the player to explore and discover the world entirely by themselves.

And at its heart, Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t want you to know anything – it wants you to discover it for yourself. The game is set in a fantasy world where the player is chosen as the ‘Arisen,’ a heroic figure who battles an ancient dragon who is revered as a leader-like figure. To do this, the player must explore the world, battle fierce foes, unlock abilities, and eventually face the dragon.

At its heart, this game has a very straightforward plot. From the moment you begin, you’re set on a direct path. But that’s only how it seems. Like most games in the open-world fantasy genre, Dragon’s Dogma lets you go off and explore this vast fantasy land, and it forces you to take your sweet time while doing it. You won’t find easy fast travel in this game! To get to most places with any sort of haste, you’ll have to hire an oxcart or otherwise venture out into the world and be faced by orcs, goblins, harpies, ogres, cyclopes, griffins who will continue to slow down your movements as trekking through this world is both an awesome never-ending series of epic battles and a tedium of managing an ever-declining health bar.

When I say this game is punishing, I mean it! You don’t get to get halfway through a battle and decide to refill your entire health bar. No, through each combat encounter bit by bit, your health will decline, and the amount you can heal yourself will decline with it. Your companions, pawns that travel between worlds and possess unique abilities (defined by those world’s own Arisen aka other players), will also lose health and occasionally die if you don’t have the time or the ability to resurrect them.

It’s difficult to manage your party at times, especially when that party has to consist of at least two characters designed by the players who will either be in combat or be a burden. For example, when facing an ogre in the early game, I found I had a frighteningly low number of companions who could actually engage the beast in close-quarter combat. I encountered Harpies who screeched and dived at me from the sky. I needed an archer, but had none, and so had to embarrassingly flee the encounter.

It’s all about planning your journey accordingly. And it’s important you recognize the strengths and values of each of the main six classes, as well as the four secret ones I have yet to encounter in my playthrough, and how they benefit your strategy. The main six vocations, as they’re called, are – mage, sorcerer, warrior, fighter, thief, and archer. The titles themselves are fairly self-explanatory, mages and sorcerers do magic, fighters and warriors use weapons although slightly different varieties and weights. Thieves use twin blades and rely on their speed. And archers naturally shoot.

The full vocations will be learned through your playthrough. Vocations themselves have 10 levels that unlock newer and more powerful abilities, increasing your aptitude within that vocation. It encourages you to pursue multiple vocations, which, as the Arisen, you have the ability to switch between.

A lot of games offer you this choice, but they don’t do it quite as well as Dragon’s Dogma 2 does. In fact, this game does a lot well when it comes to earned experiences. When you unlock a new ability, when you find rare armour, when you discover a hidden cave or a lost village – the game makes you feel like you earned this by increasingly providing more difficult scenarios to fight and to navigate.

It does become a tedium, though, when you are simply trying to travel between the capital Vermund and the Checkpoint Town for example. And while you can hire a cart to deliver you between locations, that doesn’t feel right when the game rewards you so much for exploration. I won’t lie, it would be nice to go on a five-minute trip without being delayed 15 times by goblin attacks.

I’m finding the world fascinating and full of things to see and find; it doesn’t quite feel stressfully occupied. I mean this in a sense that the NPCs that inhabit this world don’t seem to… well, inhabit it. I’ve had some great encounters with NPCs; CAPCOM gave me the impression that these characters would behave as if they had lives of their own. And while behaviours do change based on the day cycle and whether there are monsters around or not, oftentimes, I could find most characters exactly where I left them.

I could go to a shop day or night and find the shopkeeper there instead of, perhaps being in bed or off at the tavern where he might be. This breaks up the immersion of the fantasy world when it behaves too much like a game. Obviously, it is a game – BUT the experience sold is this is a game that makes you feel as though you are living in a world where a dragon could rip out your heart and make you fight it for the fate of the world.

It’s a small complaint to make, but it does feel as though CAPCOM is one step away from making this world a little bit more believable. When they have monsters with such unique behaviours and a cornucopia of lore that you work to discover, it feels like the last piece of the puzzle that got lost from the box is not included in this masterpiece.

While it might not have as many options as Baldur’s Gate or Starfield when it comes to your character’s narrative, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is still one hell of a game with explosive action and a beautiful world right at your fingertips.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is available now on PC, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5.