As I said, WKC2 is a continuation of WKC, and this carries over to the online co-op quests as well. One unlocks most quests through a confusing Guild Rank (GR) system where players must earn points through the primarily single-player-based errands and bounties system. Upon earning enough points, players then level up to the next rank. Upon getting certain ranks, players can then unlock the online quests which require that GR. The quests for WKC2 require at least GR16, so newly-created WKC2 characters will have lots of grinding to look forward to before they can get to the 6-player co-op. Fortunately, WKC quests are also available in WKC2, so you will have the opportunity to grab some of these quests before GR16. These are only up to 4-player co-op, however, and while higher levels of difficulty are available for the lowest level quests (unlocked by the required GR, of course), it feels a little disappointing to jump into a new game and be confined to the first game’s online quests.
On the bright side, if you can find an open city (the quests are hosted through player city interfaces) where a player is setting up a quest AND that quest has an open spot, it appears that for many quests you can jump on it even if you don’t have either the quest itself unlocked or the corresponding GR. Unfortunately, though, that’s a lot of conditions that rarely line up. And god help you if you want to try to get two people in on a quest together who don’t have any quests unlocked. While playing WKC with other people is certainly a nice change of pace from playing the single-player, the quests are often very simple in structure (collect things, talk to people, kill X number of enemies, kill Y boss, etc.). That combined with the forced grinding in order to have a reliable way to play with friends makes me feel that players who like this kind of online system may be better off looking somewhere else (read: any MMO). It really confounds me why a developer would want to make it so much of a headache for friends to play a game together. Why should co-op be the reward for sinking hours upon hours into the single-player portion? The co-op in WKC2 is certainly a supplement and nothing more, which is very disappointing (especially since, as a sequel, one might have hoped they would have taken the opportunity to improve).
I certainly wanted to like WKC2, but between the mechanic frustrations in single-player and frustrations of even getting into the co-op mode, I ended up, well, frustrated. As I said before, if you really dug the first game, WKC2 will probably be right up your lane. WKC2 was certainly made for fans who completed WKC and will likely provide those types of people with up to hundreds of hours of content. More casual players, or players who just want to jump right into WKC2, will find less to enjoy here. Between lack of explanation and locked content which pretty much involves grinding to get to, WKC2 certainly does a disservice to this type of player.
Verdict
Co-Op Score
Overall
The Co-Op Experience: Play specific quests online with up to six players.
Co-Optimus game reviews focus on the cooperative experience of a game, our final score graphic represents this experience along with an average score for the game overall. For an explanation of our scores please check our Review Score Explanation Guide.