Book Of Potentia 2

Dungeon crawlers are designed to be difficult and fun at the same time, especially since most of them also feature a permadeath mechanic that prevents you from taking too many risks. Knowing that you have to restart the whole thing if you die is a good incentive to put a bit more effort into your playthrough, as well as to pay more attention to your character’s skills to get the most out of them.

Book Of Potentia 2 is a short roguelike RPG in which you have to explore simple dungeons and use your sorceress skills in order to defeat enemies and find better buffs for your spells. The game is not complex enough to keep you engaged for more than a few minutes, especially since a complete playthrough takes under an hour, but some of the gameplay ideas are quite neat.

The first one of them is the aiming system, because you have to use the mouse in order to aim and shoot. However, there’s a bit of a delay between clicking and the projectile taking off, which means that you have to predict where the enemies will be when the shot reaches them. It can be a tad counterintuitive at first, but things become easier to manage once you get used to the mechanics.

The levels are never the same, but then again they are basically rectangular rooms with monsters that spawn randomly across them. Hence, even if they are procedurally-generated every time you start a new game, the differences are not very noticeable, which only adds to the frustration. Thankfully, there’s a co-op mode that might make the experience worth multiple playthroughs, since it’s much more fun to go through the game with a friend.

As far as the controls are concerned, they are pretty accurate most of the time, but you might run into trouble if you decide to use an Xbox controller instead of the mouse and keyboard. The graphics are pretty basic as well, since there is no engaging artwork to go along with the boring tiles and repetitive enemies that keep spawning ad infinitum.

In the end, Book Of Potentia 2 is far from a revolutionary game, and it doesn’t add much to classic dungeon crawler formula either. Hence, it might be fun for a few minutes whenever you have nothing better to do, but it’s a very forgettable experience.