3/5 ★ – AJD92's review of Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise.

Right so Deadly Premonition is my favourite game of all time. Not because I think it's so bad it's good, but because I think it's a masterpiece with a couple of rough edges.   Yes there was some jank, yes the combat felt like a cheap Resident Evil 4 and yes there were some incredibly frustrating quick time events, but the voice acting was fantastic and fit with the characters, every character from the main cast to the side NPCs were all unique, Greenvale felt like a real place with a deep and fleshed-out world and it's one of the very few games to make me shed a tear with how much it grabbed me in and made me care for its characters.   This sequel was never going to live up to the original for me, I knew that, yet I'm still let down. An average of 15fps and three crashes in 20 hours isn't acceptable. Yes, Deadly Premonition was known for running terrible but only in ports on PS3, PC and the Switch prior to some patching. The original Xbox 360 version ran at a mostly stable 30fps and technically worked fine. It frustrates me that people are excusing that state it's in as part of the charm when it never was to begin with, even more so that I can imagine the devs knowing this and using it as an excuse to release it in such a state.   Even more so, if this game gets patched and works at a solid 60fps it won't fix a lot of the problems. Le Carre feels mostly lifeless and empty, the cast doesn't have anything on those of the last game, the trans character is handled pretty terribly, York impersonating an African man is needless and pointless, the otherworld sections are far worse than before as they have been reduced to a few hallways with nothing but full combat where at least the first had puzzles and was scary and the new cartoony art style just doesn't fit the tone.   As for what good I can say, the soundtrack is great even if half of it is from the original, the cast all give good performances and the 2019 sections are really intriguing even if they can drag on a bit   Even if it's patched I find it hard to recommend this to anyone unless you absolutely loved the original and need to know what happened after it like me, even if I would have preferred that story to have stayed contained.