Nioh 2 Review: 100 Hours With the Best Soulslike Combat I've Played

I have played a pile of Soulslikes at this point, and Nioh 2 has the best combat of the bunch. That is not a small claim, and I do not make it lightly.

This is the Complete Edition on PC, which bundles the base game with all three DLC expansions: The Tengu’s Disciple, Darkness in the Capital, and The First Samurai. Team Ninja built it as a prequel to the first Nioh, dropping you into a demon-infested version of Japan’s Sengoku period.

It is also one of the hardest games I have ever finished.

Go in swinging wildly without learning the systems and you will have a miserable time, but learn them and it becomes one of the most satisfying action games around.

The combat goes deeper than any Soulslike I have played

The weapon variety here is wild. Every weapon type plays completely differently, from the switchglaive I mained to katanas, dual swords, odachi, kusarigama, and plenty more.

On top of that sits the three-stance system. High, mid, and low stances change your speed, damage, and ki cost, and you swap between them mid-combo to react to whatever is in front of you.

Then there is ki pulse, the mechanic that ties it all together. Time a button press right after your attacks and you instantly recover a chunk of stamina, which keeps you aggressive instead of standing around waiting to breathe.

That is before you even touch Onmyo magic and ninjutsu. These give you spells, buffs, debuffs, elemental damage, and throwing tools that completely change how you approach a fight.

I built around a switchglaive user leaning on Onmyo magic and ninjutsu, with a lot of fire and poison skills, and I had an absurd amount of fun with it. Setting enemies on fire while poison ate away at their health never got old.

The depth is the whole point.

Take your time, read the tooltips, and actually learn what everything does, because this game does not hold your hand.

Yokai Shift and Soul Cores add another whole layer

The big addition that separates Nioh 2 from the original is Yokai Shift.

You transform into a demon for a short window, gaining new attacks, extra damage, and a defensive safety net.

It saved my life over and over. Whenever a fight went sideways, popping Yokai Shift got me out of trouble, and against bosses it let me dish out a big pile of extra damage at exactly the right moment.

Tied to that are Soul Cores. You collect them from defeated yokai and slot them to use enemy abilities as your own, which opens up a deep customization layer on top of everything else.

Mixing Soul Cores with my weapon and magic setup gave me even more ways to tune my character. It is one more system in a game already overflowing with them, and it is a good one.

Ignore the loot at first, then obsess over it later

Nioh 2 has a loot system as deep as a full action RPG, with rarities, set bonuses, and stat rolls all over the place. The common advice is to mostly ignore it on your first playthrough, and that is exactly what I did.

For my whole first run I just equipped whatever had the highest numbers and moved on. It worked completely fine and let me focus on learning to fight.

Once I hit New Game Plus, everything changed. I started crafting weapons, paying attention to set bonuses, and thinking about how all my gear fit together.

By the second tier of New Game Plus, gear planning becomes genuinely important.

The game eases you into its loot grind instead of dumping it on you all at once, which I appreciated.

Bite-sized missions instead of an open world

Nioh 2 is not open world. It is built around a mission-select map, where you pick a level, drop in, fight through it, and come back out.

I will be honest, this is not my favorite way to structure a game like this. I tend to like a more connected world I can get lost in.

That said, I did not mind it at all. There is something nice about each mission being its own self-contained Soulslike world, and the format kept the pacing tight across a very long game.

Co-op makes the wall-bangs survivable

This is where Nioh 2 quietly shines. You can summon AI-controlled versions of other players as allies, and I leaned on them constantly.

For tough bosses especially, having a capable AI partner pulling aggro and chipping in damage made a huge difference. I used them all the time and rarely regretted it.

There were also four or five fights where I hit a complete wall and summoned a real human player to help.

Even now the community is active enough that I never waited long for a match, and everyone I played with was friendly and helpful.

Graphics, sound, and one PC mod I would not play without

Performance was great out of the box. I ran a steady 4K at 60fps with no trouble, but the image looked a little muddy and washed out at first.

The fix was a mod called Nioh 2 Redux: Vivid and Cinematic Enhancements with Balanced Optional Effects.

After installing it the whole game looked dramatically better, with cleaner colors and far more punch. If you are playing on PC, I cannot recommend it enough.

The sound design is excellent across the board.

Every weapon has weight and bite, the enemies sound nasty and threatening, and there is a constant spooky ambiance that keeps the mood tense.

I also loved that characters speak their own languages. Japanese characters speak Japanese, foreign characters speak their own tongue, and it all makes sense for the setting instead of flattening everyone into English.

The music does its job well. It is quiet and tense while you explore, big and bombastic during fights, and calm when you finally get a moment to rest. I will not be adding any of it to a playlist, but it fits every scene it plays in.

A muddled story in a pretty but repetitive setting

The story is a bit of a mess, and I say that as someone who really liked the first game’s plot.

Something about a time-traveling evil wizard who might also be your character’s father, and you eventually stop him.

I finished the whole thing and still could not fully tell you what happened. The plot is mostly here to push you from one fight to the next, and the gameplay is clearly the priority.

You move through real events from Japanese history, and I suspect it lands a lot harder if you already know the period. With more background on the Sengoku era, I think I would have gotten more out of it.

My one real complaint is the environment variety.

So many missions take place in a ruined town, a ruined castle, a ruined town on fire, a ruined castle on fire, a battlefield, or a battlefield on fire, with a lot of caves mixed in.

There are some genuinely beautiful spots, especially in the final DLC, and they stand out because of how striking they are.

I just wish there were a few more of them spread across the rest of the game.

A mountain of endgame content, and my verdict

The amount of content here is almost ridiculous.

The base game alone is huge, and the three DLCs each add a stack of excellent new missions that hold up to everything that came before.

After all that, the New Game Plus difficulty ladder kicks in: Dream of the Strong, then Demon, then Wise, then Nioh. Each tier ramps up the challenge and unlocks new features and gear tiers.

I played the full game, all three DLCs, then ran the whole thing again on Dream of the Strong and had a blast doing it. Then I started Dream of the Demon and tapped out pretty fast.

There was a serious difficulty spike there, and the idea of slowly grinding through the entire game three more times, each one harder, was more than I wanted after roughly 100 hours. If you love the combat enough to chase that, a huge amount of content is waiting for you.

So here is the verdict. Nioh 2 is an easy recommendation if you like Soulslikes, and it has the best moment-to-moment combat I have found anywhere in the genre.

The only game I might put slightly above it is Black Myth Wukong, and even then it is close. If deep, demanding action combat is what you are after, very few games do it this well.

You can view my full playthrough of the game with the YouTube paylist below:

–

Images are from the Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition page on Steam and used under Fair Use.