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Let’s get one thing out of the way- Dragon Quest Builders 2 is huge. It’s definitely there on the Isle of Awakening, but on other islands it feels like a bit of a waste of time to develop anything other than your main objective. It’s much more about fulfilling requests, going out and exploring and slowly building up a community than it is just about creating. The blocky graphic style may lead you to believe that Dragon Quest Builders 2 is similar to Minecraft, but that would really be reducing what Builders is all about. For fans of the franchise though, that may be worth jumping in for in itself. That’s a bit of a general issue with Builders 2 though, although we’ll get to that later.ĭragon Quest Builders 2 does play into the overall mythology of the series, but as someone who hasn’t played any of the other games it didn’t really do much for me. I do wish there was a little less talking though, as the more you play the more you just want to keep on playing without being interrupted. Every character seems to have a quip for their situation, and the story never gets too serious which was a nice change of pace.
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The story is punctuated by the Dragon Quest charm I’d heard so much about. The bond between Malroth and the player is really at the forefront here and it’s effective at keeping you playing. Going into more depth would be spoiling it, but this is certainly a game trying to tell a story. You start off kidnapped on a boat learning the basics of creation, before eventually finding yourself on The Isle of Awakening with the amnesiac Malroth.
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The pick up and play nature of the game is perfect for handhelds, and the frame rate only really becomes an issue when you venture into other player creations.ĭragon Quest Builders 2 has you playing as a builder, characters who have the ability to create things in a world that has outlawed it. For one of the game’s bigger features, that’s pretty unacceptable, even if it is dependent on how complicated the player structures are.īeyond that, Dragon Quest Builders 2 works quite well for Switch. I’d heard how bad it was but it is genuinely close to unplayable and ends up looking like a slideshow. The story mode doesn’t generally see the worst of this, but good luck if you want to look at other people’s creations online. It’s still perfectly playable compared to other console releases, but the frame rate issues can be annoying. Drops are frequent and can make the gameplay feel a bit choppy overall which is a shame. The console releases aim for a solid 60fps whilst the Switch can only manage 30 on occasion. The bigger issue comes with the frame rate. There’s obviously a little bit of a downgrade as there always is, but the style makes Builders 2 look great no matter where you play it. Dragon Quest Builders 2 actually looks really good on Switch, and there’s not too much graphical difference between this version and the console releases. I love Slimes, Rats and Akira Toriyama designs now, and there’s no going back from that.īefore we take a look at the game itself, we’ve got to give you the all-important Switch port details. I’m happy to say that despite a slow start, Dragon Quest Builders 2 eventually clicked with me like I hoped it would. I was afraid it wasn’t really for me, and thought it’d be one of those games that just go over my head. This worry wasn’t alleviated when I found Dragon Quest Builders 2 very hard to get into for the first hours.
#DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS REVIEW SERIES#
Having never played a Dragon Quest game before, I was a little bit worried about using a spin-off to jump into the series for the first time.