DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue Review

deathspank thongs of virtue Credit: Hothead Games

My hero DeathSpank hasn't changed much in the last few months. He's still running around dispensing Justice (with a capital J, obviously) to anyone that needs it. He remains the champion of the downtrodden. And if you've got some evil to vanquish, you can't do better than Mr. Spank.

Unfortunately for him, the second trip to his world isn't a whole lot different from the first. As an action RPG, it's still super-streamlined, which might annoy some of the more hardcore fans of the genre. The combat is ultra-simple, with four buttons mapped to four different weapons and no spells to speak of. Other than how much HP you have left, the only meter that you need to pay attention to is the Justice meter which, when full, unleashes whatever special attack your weapon has under its sheath. It's not a very deep combat system.

Only further serving to annoy hardcore players, many of the quests aren't very well laid-out. Getting a quest to go to the Town of Strumfuquel in order to buy some rum so Captain Taint will consider you a real pirate, thus allowing you to borrow his ship so you can go to the North Pole and fight Santa Claus, only to find out that you won't actually get to work on that assignment until several hours later, with no explanation that that's the case, is rather annoying. It doesn't help that at any given time you could have dozens of uncompleted quests with no real direction from any of them, leading to some parts of the game spent wandering around wondering what to do next.

Not much on the character customization side has changed, either. You still get Hero Cards when you level, and they do the exact same things as in the first game, i.e. increased damage, speed, shields, or money drops from enemies. The loot and inventory operate exactly the same way, with no randomized weapons or armor and no numbers to crunch other than damage of weapons and bonuses to life from armor. Armor is changed in and out with little fanfare, and the only real, perceivable difference between, say, the Greatest Generation Helmet and the Mustache Ranchero is how silly the latter looks on Deathspank.