Ittle Dew 2 Review

Ittle Dew 2 has you play as an adventuress named Ittle Dew and her winged-fox named Tippsie in an journey to find the 8-raft pieces hidden in some of the most improbable locations including: a sand castle, a pillow fort, and even a desert wasteland to escape from the island built for adventurers. Made by Ludosity, this title boasts a whimsical world that includes platypuses, death traps and even an icy environment on an island dedicated to thrill-seekers. Will Ittle and Tippsie’s gallivanting be enough to tickle our interests or will the journey fall flat as a failed sequel?

Rocking Soundtrack – Ittle Dew 2 has some of the most entertaining music I have heard in an Indie game in quite some time. Each section of the world had its own set of music including tracks for tunnels that play when you go inside buildings or caves. Each song had me bouncing my head lightly as I explored every bit of the world that I could. From intense music during major battles or serious areas to soft, light-heartened music playing as you roam around the whole island. Another great thing is that you can find a music player hidden within one of the optional caves which allows you to listen to all the music Ittle Dew 2 has to offer in the extras menu.

Awesome game-play – This has a somewhat Legend of Zelda vibe to it, being able to explore any dungeon for the raft pieces in any order that you want. You don’t have to worry about needing a specific item to be able to continue through the dungeon since there are multiple paths you can take to get to the boss at the end. Even most of the optional caves littered around the island can be completed with the stick that you acquire at the start. Being able to choose your own path is one of the most enjoyable features as the player can just run straight to the more tedious sections to give themselves more of a challenge at the beginning or start out easy and face against the challenges in order of difficulty. Even the small jokes lightly sprinkled throughout the story made me chuckle and enjoy it even further as I slaughtered the platypus-looking enemies across the land.

Drawn graphics – Everything about the graphics are beautiful including enemies that look great and their attacks all look fantastic. It’s completely fun to try and scour the whole island to find every little bit of work they put into it and how they correlated hand-drawn images with 3D graphics such as the image above. You can even find a collectible that allows you observe a bunch of different artwork for character/enemy creation to the development of the different areas of the island. You can tell they really put in the time and effort so that the player can appreciate it fully.

No penalty for dying – One of the things I found poor about the game was a lack of any penalty for dying. Whenever you die you respawn either at the beginning of the dungeon or somewhere around the area you recently died at. With no penalty to make a player worry about the impact of dying there is no real concern over getting completely destroyed while exploring a dungeon or fighting a boss. There were many times when I was low on health in a dungeon I would just kill myself without a second thought and run back to where I was originally.

Difficulty curve – Ittle Dew 2’s difficulty curve doesn’t really change throughout the eight main dungeons, but once you hit the side dungeons the difficulty sky-rockets immensely. Beginners won’t have any real issue running through the main campaign but some of the puzzles, as well as specific enemies, will bring greater frustration as you progress towards the end. I ran into quite a few puzzles where it was trial-and-error trying to figure out what was effective and what wasn’t in defeating them.

Ittle Dew 2 is some of the most fun I’ve had playing Indie games that have come out for the Xbox One recently. The jokes and music were my favorite about it and I believe that Ludosity have outdone themselves with their sequel to the original. ID2 is an enjoyable piece of work that I believe anyone of age or gender will have a good time with and is not a failure whatsoever. At the time of writing this review I have played a total of 8 hours and have completed everything possible within the game to make sure I gave it a thorough and sincere review. It really is a blast!

Ittle Dew 2 was developed by Ludosity and published by Nicalis. It was released on November 15, 2016 and is available on Xbox One [reviewed], PlayStation 4 and Steam.  A press review copy was provided for The Hidden Levels, but this is in no way factored into our review scores. Games are scored on their individual merits and our rating system is explained here.