izigame.me

It seems the online consensus towards Wargroove 2 is much quieter and borderline negative compared to Wargroove 1. After playing both back to back, I'm honestly not sure why.

Wargroove 1 longer to complete, but the main reason for this is that WG1's Arcade Mode takes 4x longer to finish with each commander than the main mode does. This is *more* content, but it is not necessarily "better" content.

Wagroove 2's story mode is separated into three smaller campaigns that converge in a final two-part endgame. Each of these three individual campaigns has better map design, higher stakes, and MUCH better writing than Wargroove's story did, especially the Felheim and Saffron Island campaigns. Wargroove 2 got me invested in the characters in a way the original never even came close to doing. Additionally, WG2 has tighter balance and the new overcharged groove system is fantastic. The first game's S-Rank requirements (which was always just a turn counter) have been replaced with a much more interesting Bonus Star system. Completing a map gets one star, and then each map has two bonus objectives that encourage different and often more difficult play styles. This is such a welcome change and is way more fun to actually accomplish than S-Ranking every map in the first game. The only boring stars are the ones that are "Finish in X turns", and that was literally every map in Wargroove 1.

The new Conquest Mode is actually fun, which WG1's Arcade Mode was decidedly not. The map creator is still there and still very intricate. Overall, WG2 is just a tighter and more interesting experience. Yes, there is less game in Wargroove 2, but the game that is there is better.

That said, it's not perfect. The sequel is much buggier than the first game was. I hear this is a big issue in online PvP, which I have not tried personally (I'm a single-player kind of SRPG guy). It also came up a few times in the main campaign. Pistil's groove bugged out on me more than once and actually broke a Bonus Star in one of the maps I tried to play. The game has trouble recognizing when all your units have finished moving if they're tethered by a kraken.

The UI/UX has not been improved as much as I'd like either, which is odd considering the assets for the rest of the game are mostly imported from WG1, which makes it feel like they could've put more time into the little quality of life things. There is now a "skip intro cutscene" option when you retry, but it doesn't really work. In-map cutscenes and tutorials still play every time no matter what and cannot be skipped, even if you've seen them before, which is very stupid. The biggest issue I had was in Conquest Mode when starting a new run. The commander and formation options always popped up a frame earlier than I expected and I clicked them early without reading them multiple times. There's no back button or confirmation button either, so you just have to restart the game and abandon your old run if this happens. This seems like a dumb, avoidable problem, but it ended up happening to me like seven times, and at that point it feels like a structure problem more than a player issue.

That being said, I definitely enjoyed my time with WG2 more than the first game, especially regarding completion. Wargroove had a lot of extra content, but most of it was padding or locked behind padding that you had to grind out in Arcade mode (again, unfun.) Wargroove 2 has almost no extra content, but what is there is actually engaging. Speaking as a completionist, I vastly prefer a solid 20 hour experience to an obnoxious 100 hour experience.

It also must be said that both games are $20 each when bundled together. This is insanely cheap. Well worth the pricetag. I could see the complaints about WG2 being small if the game cost $60, but it doesn't, so I don't get it, especially after the Double Trouble DLC from the first game was completely free.

Looking forward to Wargroove 3!