Do you like clicking things and increasing difficulty? Buy this. Great fun, especially at the price point. Mechanics increase in complexity as you unlock new things but never get in the way of the core gameplay loop

The Factory Must Grow.
The Factory Must Grow.
The Factory Must Grow.

CA messed up the Total War Series, and I'm sad it took me technical problems on my own system to realise. I was one of the unfortunate souls that was simply not able to play this game for longer than 15 minutes without crashing. Was still excited at that point, but getting to the full experience of this game would require a new player to spend around 300,- euros. That is a frankly, insane amount of money for what this and other Total War games are.

Don't support CA for products like this. Vote with your wallet. A few games I can recommend that are under the price of a single TW:WH3 DLC:
Terraria
Project Zomboid
Plants versus Zombies (the original)
Mini Motorways
Binding of Isaac

And so much more. Even if you think there'll be no other game in this niche that'll scratch the itch, just hold off on buying any of this stuff. CA will only learn to respect their customers and shipped finished products unlike CDPR, Bethesda, and seemingly every other game dev out there with some legacy to their name.
♥♥♥♥ the corporate money race. Pirate it for all I care

This review is slightly premature - I have not yet beat the game (which I intend to do) but I'm quite sure my opinion is already quite formed. If not, I'll edit this later. For brevity I'll assume you know how the game works a little bit.

I like Darkest Dungeon 2 a lot. I love Darkest Dungeon 1.

And a large part of the problems I have with this game stem from those two sentences. In isolation, this game is an amazing take on the Hades style rogue lite - there's a story you follow, characters interact to a certain extent, and death is not the end as you power up for the next run to get you even further. But this progression feels off compared to DD1.

Runs in DD2 are too long compared to DD1 - failure is part of the gameplay experience, but it is hard to trace back why you failed in DD2. Was it your party comp against the final boss? Sometimes you simply get a DPS check - nothing wrong with this, you get these all the time in games. But with rare exception can you actually do anything to change the outcome. Compared to DD1, you could cut your losses and save the characters. The characters were the invested time and gold - flee, preserve them and live to fight with your gained knowledge.

Sometimes in Darkest Dungeon I feel powerless. You're not in charge of what will happen and you never will truly be. And that's what I love about these games. They challenge you to make the best of a bad situation.

But I feel like I'm just waiting for the game to allow me to unlock the correct character paths and incremental upgrades, combat items, trinkets - and that's not knowledge I'm getting. I'm not making the most of a bad situation. The situation is getting better.

The game is good, potentially great even - but it's more of a testament to how good DD1 was than how good DD2 is.

not the good type of RNG, game feels more grindy than tactical or fun

Crashed and froze on me - I didn't get very deep in the game but combat wise there didn't seem to be much to set it apart from just another game in the genre