DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue

Thongs Of Virtue is the second game in the Deathspank series. The game is a humorous hack-and-slash RPG. You are greeted with a Lord Of The Rings-style narrated intro which tells you about DeathSpank and his quest to claim all the “Thongs of Virtue”; which are underpants with special powers.

You can play with keyboard and mouse, or with a controller. I only used a controller because I found that to be a more comfortable option in the first game.

The game is designed for single-player but does have a co-op mode. It seems one of those Nintendo-style co-op modes where the second player is more of an assistant rather than a unique player.

The mechanics are explained over time, although you have these abilities from the start. So at first you just slash at things, but later you are told you can block. Further in, you are told that alternating attacks gives you a combo bonus which deals more damage.

As you kill enemies, you gain experience and they drop coins and loot. Your equipment is the typical RPG style so you have helm, gloves, boots, chest armour, ring and necklace. There's an option to auto-equip armour, but not weapons. You may still want to make minor tweaks to gain extra elemental resistance, but I found it's fine to auto-equip. The elements are Nature, Fire, Ice, and Undeath; whatever that means.

Some weapons are special, indicated by their purple name, and trigger a special “Justice” attack when charged. There's also Magical Orbs which provide a limited use spell.

There are potions that instantly heal you, whereas the food items restore damage over time as long as you aren't attacking or receiving damage. If you want to consume food when engaging enemies, then you must flee; otherwise you use the costlier potions. The game is extremely generous with its food and coin drops, and you can always purchase potions or extra food with your coins.

It's very advantageous to do the side-quests because it helps you level up. Many quest givers have a series, so going back to claim your reward gives you the next quest. Quest items cannot be found without the quest being active; so unless you are told to collect "spider eyes", killing spiders will not drop spider eyes.

When you level up, you are given 3 options of which attribute to increase. I think the max level is 20, at which point you have all the possible upgrades. It's just a matter of choosing the order to unlock them.

There are many Outhouses scattered across the map. These act as respawn points and also provide quick-travel between them. When you die, you return to your last, but you should then venture to your point of death because you do drop an amount of coins and they can be recollected.

I felt no need to buy weapons since you sometimes get weapons a level or so above what you can equip. Shop items do look costly, but you soon wrack up the coins, so paying a few thousand for a pizza is nothing when you have 500k. By the end of the game I had 1.5 million coins or so.

Instead of trekking back to the shop when your inventory is full, you can use the Grinder in your inventory to turn items into cash. This streamlines the process. Also, there are several storage chests you can dump items in for later use, and your equipment can be accessed at any one. Although I put many items in, I never felt the need to take any items out again.

The game has occasional minimal puzzles that seem influenced by point-and-click adventures. You can find fortune cookies which give you hints on how to complete the quests. The hints seem much better than the first game.

Sometimes you find that enemies are too strong, so sometimes it's best to explore a different direction and come back later. If I could get the enemies one-on-one, then I could take the strong enemies down with some skilled use of the block button.

Archers were really annoying in the first game, but there are no archers this time. There’s a few powerful enemies particularly near the start that launch grenades. The bigger annoyance were the flamethrowers since they cover a decent distance, they seem to give you knockback, and you take continuous damage from being burnt. Getting them one-on-one is key, or holding block until there’s a gap for a couple of swipes.

The main annoyance is the amount of explosives. There’s areas with exploding barrels, or TNT crates. Being close to these when they explode is instant death, and they seem to have a larger radius than depicted.

I thought the game got easier as the game progressed and was a little too easy at the end. This was a problem in the first game, and they haven’t tweaked the design here.

The game uses an interesting graphical style with the addition of 2D foliage. The colour scheme and style looks like Don't Starve. The way the map curves feels like Animal Crossing.

The game takes around 12 hours to complete which is a few hours longer than the first game. Maybe it is a bit too long in my opinion because you are just carrying out the same actions repeatedly. If you have played the first game recently, then it’s definitely going to be boring since it is just more of the same. If you are new to the series, I think you can easily start with this game if you wish.