Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise - Easy Allies Review.

Deadly Premonition 2 is a difficult game to nail down. On one hand, it's a mess, with an abysmal frame rate, lengthy loading times, and an often tedious structure. On the other, it has a wild and gripping story with a diverse cast of deeply charming characters.

It evokes the same unbalanced mood that resonates with those who love the first game, despite its shortcomings, bringing a familiar peculiarity to the continuing adventures of Francis York Morgan. And while it undoubtedly carries many of director Swery's best aspects, it's also clear that ultimately, there are obvious things that could be improved to make for a better, more consistent game.

Like the first Deadly Premonition, a murder mystery is at the heart of the plot. The game bounces between two different time periods: 2019, showing us what the lead character is up to after the first game, and 2005, when the majority of the investigation takes place.

The 2005 period serves as a prequel of sorts, so having a story that both predates and follows events we're already familiar with makes everything suitably grand. It's not just another investigation, but one that deeply ties into events the audience is already familiar with.

Split time periods do a wonderful job of sowing doubt into your mind, making you question what's going on and who's at fault. It's disorienting, but in a purposeful way, constantly egging you on while making the evil at the center of it all more insidious and intriguing.

Like any good mystery, your appetite to find the answers only grows more ravenous over time. Deadly Premonition 2 does an excellent job of using its distinctly bizarre tone to draw you even deeper. Having to follow the cast of the first Deadly Premonition is a tall order, but it's another area where the game absolutely excels.

The new additions here are almost universally wonderful, each with their own traits that make them delightful to watch. FBI agent Aaliyah Davis is brilliant but cold, with a fascinating past and a penchant for quoting Nietzsche. Her partner Simon is the polar opposite, a bumbling doofus who can't shut up about pizza.

The little girl Patricia who assists your investigation and follows you around town is endearingly precocious, keeping York on his toes and comparing what you find to the things she's seen on CSI. All of these characters, as well as the scene-stealing Clarksons, play into one of Swery's central strengths as a director: his willingness for self indulgence.

Conversations are rarely, if ever, straightforward with tangents that are constant and unpredictable. Expect to hear plenty about a huge array of films, bridges, and really just general pondering. While it all sounds like it might get tiresome, here it injects an abundance of life.

Swery is completely unafraid to let his characters be overwhelmingly passionate, and he uses that passion to make them surprisingly relatable. Really the biggest disappointment when it comes to the cast and narrative is that its handling of specific issues, like its portrayal of a transgender character, can feel well-intentioned but clumsy.

The issue has been addressed in a recent patch and could be further improved in the future. Despite how likeable and distinct Deadly Premonition 2 can be, it is easily and frustratingly its own worst enemy. Even putting aside its monstrous technical issues, the design of the game is often a massive slog.

It's as if in-between the story segments the game has no idea what to do with the player. One of the most egregious examples of this is a main story mission in which you have to run all over town collecting items. The game even blatantly calls it a "shameless fetch quest".

If you want to be generous, you could say the tedium is the joke, but in these moments, Deadly Premonition 2 doesn't feel clever or subversive enough to make it land. It's hard to have a joke like this come through when the bulk of the game already feels like one drawn out and shameless fetch quest.

You can complete side activities for materials to craft upgrades, but there's absolutely no point to it. When Deadly Premonition 2 decides to feature combat, it’s as mindless as it could possibly be. There are very few enemy types, and the areas that you fight them in are so constrained, that you're just shooting fish in a barrel, likely flush with ammo and healing items.

Even worse is that these segments are so drawn out, feeling like a chore that you have to get through just to get the next bit of story. There is an argument to be made that the open world structure of Deadly Premonition 2 lets you soak in the vibe it tries to present, and while that is true, the poor frame rate actively gets in the way.

It's hard to fully enjoy what's going on when the stuttering distracts. Lengthy load times when entering or leaving a location don't help either. Performance is something that the developers have improved in a recent patch and promise to improve further, but it's not ideal at the moment.

It's possible, and even likely, to walk away from Deadly Premonition 2 absolutely loving it. Few directors can construct a world or a cast as curiously compelling as Swery does. Yet it's hard not to desperately wish that these charms were presented with more capable craftsmanship.

There is a special flavor that Swery games have, and that sometimes comes across in spite of the jank, but there has to be a better way of preserving that flavor while also making a stronger game overall. Looking for more thoughts on Deadly Premonition 2? Check out our recent episode of Frame Trap for discussion on this game as well as Ghost of Tsushima, Paper Mario: The Origami King, and more.