Overall, players are highly enthusiastic about Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, praising its combat mechanics, immersive gameplay, and the unique pawn system. However, there are notable criticisms regarding the game’s direction, pacing, and some aspects of its endgame, leading to mixed sentiments despite the overwhelming positivity in most reviews.
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is an open-world action-RPG that treats large monsters as terrain. Felling a griffin or ogre means grabbing hold and climbing, driving weapons into a weak point while it bucks beneath you, a design closer to Monster Hunter than to standard hack-and-slash. Its second signature is the Pawn system: one fully customised AI companion plus two recruited from other players' games, who learn enemy tactics and call them out mid-battle. Nine swappable vocations let the build change on demand.
Critics landed on a strong-but-rough consensus, singling out the combat and Pawn ideas as ahead of their time while judging the main story thin. Players who found it late tend to forgive the flat narrative and the finicky grab camera because the monster fights carry the whole thing. Rated Mature, it rewards anyone chasing emergent fantasy battles and leaves cold anyone who needs a plot to pull them along.
Single Player Only
Overall, players are highly enthusiastic about Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, praising its combat mechanics, immersive gameplay, and the unique pawn system. However, there are notable criticisms regarding the game’s direction, pacing, and some aspects of its endgame, leading to mixed sentiments despite the overwhelming positivity in most reviews.
Based on 68 reviews from steam
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - Review After 100%
