Dream Knockout 2 accomplishes its goal, while failing at many other. You play to lose, that's the gist of the masochist game, but since it's a game, well you can definitely win with some very annoying things you'll have to endure before you reach it.
- Art: very inconsistent. I'm no picker in terms of art, I'm fine with the developers and the artists not making peak art or anything, but being inconsistent is something much worse. The artist can't decide whether they want the Western style or the anime style, so it gets mixed together into twisting face slops. Every pose Lindsay strikes looks like a different incarnation of her gets teleported instantly into the scene before she disappears in a blink, swapping back her neutral pose. Even the fighter from the previous game looks like an American comic character trying to morph her face into an anime character, really weird. That aside, the "animation" is fine, even if it's simply a frame of her before she punches and another frame she actually punches you. The key pose makes up for the lack of proper animation so this one goes through.
- Sound: the SFX is fine. It's very average, dull, nothing spectacular to say about it. The song is also fine, and there's only 2, one for the menu, one for the fight. Gets boring really quick.
- Gameplay: while it has a good foundation and certainly is better than the last game, this game still suffers from many many problems.
The system mechanics is pretty good. You have 2 bars being health and stamina. Health determines how much you can last before you gets knocked down and stamina is the gauge needed for punching, blocking and not losing the entire round. When Lindsay punch you, both your health and stamina drains. If health reach 0, you get knocked down, if stamina reaches 0, you're unable to act until a certain amount of time passes, which could end the round then and there with you on the ground. Your stamina will refill over time during the match, so you can focus on blocking while stamina goes up. While she's sparing you on the ground, you can spam to get stamina back and while round break is happening, you can trade your regenerating stamina for health. These makes for a very solid meter managing game, where you evaluate which course of action is better: trade stamina for health but risk losing the next round in a few punches? Block until you you get all your stamina back for safety or just risk it and punch her right now? Decent amount of options to consider.
Your punishment for not playing the meter game well is to not only lose a bunch of health and gets put in a very bad spot, you also lose max stamina and max health when she strangles you, which is pretty bad for later rounds, so make sure you never lose all your stamina and drop dead on the ground.
However, the actual fighting isn't so fortunate. First off, I have to comment the audacity to make the punch button DOWN. The game functions on 5 button, directional arrows and spacebar. Blocking is done by left, right and UP. This makes the game unnecessarily more annoying, if the straight block button is down, then you can block with much more ease and punching feels more sensical since you know, UP, you're punching forward.
And you will need that blocking layout because the blocking in here is incredibly annoying too. As said, you have 3 directions to block, but, here's the thing, you cannot hold two directions at once, and it will void out your inputs immediately if done so. This may sound normal at first, until you try blocking yourself and see that you constantly stops blocking despite holding a button. That's because when you were blocking one direction and react to her about to strike another direction, you may have pressed the other arrow key while the previous arrow key is still being held. If this occurs for even 1 frame, your character stops blocking altogether, even if you are now currently holding down the direction you're supposed to block. This makes the important act of blocking extremely tedious, as you have to let go your current key and THEN hold the other key. And in this game, you will have to block a lot to regain stamina for your own punches, so good luck not fumbling too much and lose as a result. It's a fix the dev certainly can do, but they didn't so the game will forever be tedious like this unless brave fella mods it.
Oh yeah, punches. Yeah, they're fine... when you figured out what to do. The game only mentions that you have to "time your punches to do a 5-hit combo", but you never get a demonstration for that. You have to press punch 5 times in a certain rhythm and each hit will be more damaging than the last. Problem is that you kinda don't know what that rhythm is before you get knocked down 10 times. This game could benefit from a training mode, maybe a training dummy (a real one, not... yourself) so you can practice the 5 hit combo before going into the game. When you figure out the rhythm and that diabolical timing for the 5th hit, you're golden from now on. She can even get into a dizzy state for you to get a free 6th hit which blows up like 40% of her healthbar. It's still very much infuriating to know what the 5-hit combo looks like, I almost dropped the game just because it was incredibly unclear.
Overall difficulty: it's hard to start, but relatively easy after you get a grip of what to do. There's two options for you to pick, although they're similar in terms of difficulty. Sparring is where Lindsay rarely do the long barrage of punches and doesn't do the cheeky side-switch punches. Challenge is when she goes all out... but the long combos are stable patterns so you essentially get free stamina for a while, the side-switches are pretty hard though, I admit. A few combos later and 3-4 rounds of her on the ground, you win.
H-content: while you can win to get payback, the main content is still you losing. It's a maso game, of course it's all in there. While I'm no big masochist enjoyer, I can get the thrill and I know you lot out there will enjoy these scenes a lot. It's underwhelming if you do decide to win though. So, the H-content is great... except... there's no gallery mode. You can't view all of the scenes afterwards nor can you easily access the payback time. An H-game missing gallery mode is like a pie without cream... It's more thrilling from the actual battles, but it's still not very good to just not include gallery mode.
Conclusion: it's... not pretty good. While I know the masochist part and allat is fine, the actual gameplay is tedious and learning how to play it at first will be not fun at all. The game itself is flimsy and the art definitely doesn't cover that aspect very well. If you're a masochist, well enjoy your meal, you'll like it, but once you're done with that and want to beat the game for real, good luck at blocking everything without messing up. 6.5/10.
