It’s been a while since I had the chance to take on a Souls-style game, so when the chance came to preview Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition on PC, I jumped on it. I soon found out this one was quite a bit tougher for me to play than Code Vein was, but after about 10 hours, I think I got the hang of this enough to give my thoughts.
The story here begins as a prequel to the previous title. Which is good since I didn’t play the first one, so I wasn’t lost at all starting out here. It follows a character named Hide who is a half-yokai. These people are referred to as “Shiftlings.” You set out on adventure with a merchant named Tokichiro to rid the world of yokai and unify their great nation.
I was pretty impressed with the look of Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition on PC. Everything was highly detailed and the monsters and environments looked amazing. I ran the game at a resolution of 2028 x 1152 with all the graphic settings set to max, and I got a solid 60 FPS out of my 2060 KO. You can run the game at up to 4K 120FPS, if you have the hardware to push it. The team does plan to implement DLSS down the line and this should help you get a bit more performance out of your GPU.
The very first thing you are greeted with when you begin to play Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition is the amazing character creator. There are so many details you can adjust in here I couldn’t begin to go over them all here. No matter if you decide to be male or female, you will find tons of options to make your avatar anyway you want them to be. The amazing armor sets and weapons only make you look more badass as you progress in the game as well.
I had a lot of fun with the gameplay here. Some of the most important aspects of combat I found were: Yokai Abilities, Yokai Shift and Ki Pulse. The Yokai Abilities you have at your disposal will depend on which soul core you have equipped. Yokai Abilities will consume a bit of Anima when you use them, but you can easily restore this by simply defeating enemies These are a wide range of attacks that do a good amount of damage but, more importantly, limit the amount of Ki your foe can produce. Ki is needed to attack, so this will limit them in the number of attacks they can throw out there quickly. This is why using your Ki Burst is very important as well. All you need to do to activate this is simply press R1 when the blue light is circling you after an attack, and your Ki will restore much faster. Last, let’s talk about Yokai Shift. When you activate this, your Life and Ki are replaced by a power source that allows for even more powerful attacks, known as your Yokai Shift gauge. You can deal massive damage to even the boss monsters.
There are tons of different weapons, armor and skills for the player to explore. Each weapon is very different and has three different stances to use as well. Low stance is for speed, middle is a balance stance, and high is slower but has a lot of power. Your armor is just as important as your weapons. Each one will have special abilities that will help you survive onslaughts of enemies. Some of these will require the player to have certain stats in order to use them, so you may need to level up a bit before you get the most out of certain piece. You will also need to watch the amount of weight you equip as well. This has a huge impact on how much Ki you consume when attacking and dodging. Combine both of those with the tons of skills you can learn on the various skills trees, and you can make tons of character builds to fit your play style. I’m not 100% sure I have found my style yet, but I’m having fun getting my ass kicked at the very least.
I have to say, overall, I think Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition is shaping up to be an amazing release on PC. Graphically it looks great, the gameplay is fun, plus it includes all the DLC and extras from the PlayStation release. This gives you access to over 25 Main Missions, over 100 Sub Missions & Twilight Missions, over 100 types of Demon Parade Picture Scrolls, 108 Underworld floors, new weapons and more. I feel like players of Souls-type games will get a lot of bang for their buck when this one releases on Friday.
