Review: Dark Deity 2 Refines Both Its Pixels and Its Tactics

In 2021, we took a deep look at Dark Deity, a tactical RPG from indie developer Chip Moore and his studio, Sword & Axe. Four years later, the team delivered the sequel Dark Deity 2 that looks to build on the first’s world and ideas to make something a bit larger and more polished.

Narratively, Dark Deity 2 takes the path of many before it: it’s a story sequel and it’d love if you cared about the old characters, but it’s not crucial. The game takes place 25 years after the first, so you’ll see some of the old party members, but a lot of the core crew is a new generation. The writing’s a lot stronger, too — it helps to bring on a dedicated writer, so well done — though we did find ourselves losing a bit of patience in a few of the more verbose scenes. The best consequence of a stronger focus on story is the opportunity it gives players to make meaningful choices. A few times during the game, you’ll choose a side in a fight, making different allies and sometimes seeing entire factions wiped from the map.

Though the first game wasn’t shy about its influences, Dark Deity 2 feels like it moves just a shade closer to its main inspiration in a lot of areas: classic Fire Emblem. Rather than the four different weapon trees of the original, this sequel sees a move to equippable weapons. The upgrade items for skills and stats are similar in frequency and use. Even characters feel a bit more Fire Emblem-y.

One area in which it doesn’t feel like Fire Emblem is its pace and focus on objective-based maps. Dark Deity 2 essentially treats every chapter like a special event, with the pressure on and multiple priorities to juggle. You’ll need to protect and rescue civilians, seize particular points on the map and fend off waves of reinforcements, all within a tight turn limit. (There is a difficulty that removes the time restriction, if that’s a dealbreaker for you.)

Whether that pace feels overwhelming will likely hinge on how often you use training maps. The game offers a rotating selection of ten training maps, and these are much more generic “defeat all the baddies in your own time” fare. Challenging one costs 1,000 gold, allowing you to grind up units’ levels if you want but making it come at the expense of upgrades and weapons.

There’s also a change that makes it a bit more tolerable to bring underleveled units into battle. The first Dark Deity felt built around its “grave wounds” system: permanent stat decreases instead of permanent death. This sequel makes that less severe, with penalties that last for the next chapter or so. You’ll still try to avoid it, but most of the time it happened for us, we found ourselves shrugging and just taking the penalty for a map.

Dark Deity 2 comes much closer than its predecessor to nailing its target aesthetic. The first one had excellently animated attacks, but the maps were less professional (even after a much-needed revamp) and the interface didn’t follow the pixel art look. This time around, the map sprites are charming, the environments feel like they’re done with more care and there’s even a pixel font in the menus that largely fits in with the resolution of the other art. The character art is still jarringly high-resolution, unfortunately, but it largely gets away with it.

That said, there are still elements of the game that show that it’s a small-team Game Maker project. Maps have an extra row and column that you can’t reach but your cursor can move into, losing itself off the screen. We don’t have an exact answer why, but we’d guess it’s a workaround for some limitation of the game engine. The enemy ranges, which many players keep on permanently as a nice help, don’t update with reinforcements or when terrain changes, so you have to toggle it off and on again like you’re running IT support. And the “ally” movements are often less than ideal, either idling out of the way instead of helping or running full-speed into enemy territory to their inevitable deaths.

Dark Deity 2 is far from perfect, and it could use a few rounds of post-launch polish. But it’s a strong step forward from the first game’s base, adding and refining smartly to make something within their means that’s still engaging to play. We hope they’re able to keep delivering games like this in the future!

Dark Deity 2, developed by Fire & Axe and published by Indie.io, launches March 24, 2025 on Steam.

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Dark Deity 2

Verroa is a peaceful continent on the brink of war as the Asverellian Empire seeks to expand - at your homeland’s expense. Command unlikely heroes, fight challenging turn-based battles, and watch hardship forge iron into steel. Dark Deity is back, bigger and better than before! PC version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.

Dark Deity 2 is far from perfect, and it could use a few rounds of post-launch polish, but it’s a strong step forward from the first game’s base.

Food for Thought

• If you're a fan of Fire Emblem maps with clever setups, this truly is for you. You may want to crank the difficulty up above normal on your first play, though, because if you're in that club, you're not a newbie.
• Like the first game, this sequel also packs a bunch of custom gameplay and randomizer functions. Really cool inclusion once again.
• Phase is still the best ability by far, but keep an eye out to make sure you’re sending your friend somewhere they can escape. It’s extremely easy to unintentionally get them stuck.