Dungeon Village 2

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 56 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement.

As with its predecessor, Dungeon Village 2 is more like Hot Springs Story in that you’re basically building a tourist destination of sorts in a medieval fantasy world, in this case a place heroes looking for an ideal spot to fight monsters, buy gear, and do typical adventuring stuff.

Dungeon Village 2 originally released on mobile devices in 2021, with a port to Nintendo Switch in 2022, then to PC and PlayStation 4 in 2023. This game comes nine years after the prior installment, but honestly, I can’t say too much has changed here.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals presented in an isometric view, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the forgettable music, everything about this presentation is endearing, though by this point we’ve seen more or less the same thing in numerous other Kairosoft games.

As for the gameplay, Dungeon Village 2 does improve on the prior game with better early progression and greater variety later on, but it still feels slow-paced and it’s frustrating, with the success of your town seemingly due to factors you only have indirect control over. You try to improve your town in hopes that heroes spend money there, but even as you improve it, the amount of money made doesn’t seem to increase along with the popularity. You can make heroes like your town more by gifting them gear from your weapon and armor shops, but it’s unclear if doing so will affect how much they buy from those shops. There’s just too much here that’s still nebulous and unclear.

This isn’t a terrible game, and as I said, I do think this is an improvement over the original Dungeon Village, I just don’t think it’s enough of an improvement, and I still think it’s far from one of Kairosoft’s better games. And with so many better options, I don’t recommend you go for this one.

tl;dr – Dungeon Village 2, like its predecessor, is a Management Simulation where players manage a village in a medieval fantasy setting to cater to the needs of heroes. Unfortunately, while this game is an improvement over its predecessor, it still has multiple issues that keep it from being one of Kairosoft’s better games, with slow progression and indirect control over that progression. This isn’t a terrible game, but you have numerous better options.

Grade: C

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