Costume Quest 2 Review

Candy? Candy! Halloween? Okay, maybe when I was still a kid. Costume Quest 2 is the sequel to the popular title Costume Quest. Can it live up to the previous game?

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I believe my first exposure to Costume Quest was when it came to PlayStation Plus for free years ago. Needless to say, I loved it. You are a couple of kids who get wrapped up in something so much bigger than them, and all of it is over candy! Well, Costume Quest 2 follows up on that. They return back home and it’s Halloween. A party is about to happen but you have some time to kill. The local dentist is acting suspicious so you decide to investigate and end up getting involved in a crazy plot involving time travel and saving Halloween… again!

Most games can’t do time travel right it seems. Costume Quest 2 seems to somewhat get it right, though there are some few… questionable… things that happen. The plot seems a bit hit or miss, mostly hit though. You travel forward in time, find out the world is ruined by a dentist and travel back in time to stop him. You only actually do a few jumps, and only to 2 time periods (in the main game).

Costume Quest 2 pulls a lot of the same from Costume Quest. You’ll still do some going around to houses trick or treating. You still have quests to complete. You still have treat cards and costumes to collect. Battle stamps are gone. Candy actually has the ability to be used to heal (*this was added in a patch after release)! There are also fountains about town to heal if you want, especially since you no longer automatically heal between fights!

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Battles have changed and yet they haven’t changed. The layout is still mostly the same from the first game. Your costumes and your enemies now all have “types” – beast, mechanical, magical. For costumes, they are strong and weak against particular kinds. When you attack an enemy you are strong against, that costume will deal bonus damage and vice versa for weak against.

Unlike in Costume Quest, Costume Quest 2 doesn’t have different attack inputs for each costume. I was actually pretty disappointed at this. Every costume (well, except Candy Corn which can’t attack at all) has the same timing input for their attack. I never managed to be able to totally do this timing right, especially given the frequent FPS issues in battle. There was a patch released (while I was working on the game for review) that seemed to have mostly addressed it, but it still came back for a bit. The FPS issues totally throw off your timing and then as soon as you get adjusted to them… they are gone. To say the least it’s frustrating to lose the extra damage from not getting that “awesome”. The FPS issues extend out of battle too – I frequently suffered from FPS drops on the field too.

While Costume Quest 2 isn’t perfect I feel it does at least match up to the first game in most respects. My biggest disappointment was that the game sort of just… ended. It was a bit anti-climatic. I do hope that there’s some sort of DLC story addition that extends on this, even just to give a bit more closure to the game. I also really wish the different costumes regular attack inputs actually varied some as combat really started to feel dull and boring after awhile.

Costume Quest 2 Review Score

4/5

I would like to thank Double Fine for providing me with a copy of the game for review.

Costume Quest 2 is available for purchase on Steam now.

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