Troublemaker 2: Beyond Dream Review - Beyond Redemption!?

Troublemaker is back!

Troublemaker 2: Beyond Dream

PC/Steam

9/15/25

Gamecom Team/Indie.io

Those of you that have been around the channel long enough may remember my review of 2023’s Troublemaker: Raise Your Gang from developer Gamecom Team. While not the fittest fighter in the ring, the game showed quite a bit of promise from the budding studio, and Steam reviews seemed to agree with this sentiment, sitting at a “Very Positive” to this very day. Despite the relative success of the original, two and a half years later, the beat ’em up with Yakuza flair was not exactly at the top of my mind.

Needless to say, when Troublemaker 2: Beyond Dream came through the ’ole indie inbox, I just had to try my hand at round two. Much like the original, Troublemaker 2 promises goofy, action beat ’em up gameplay taking place two years after the events of the original title. But this time around, there is more of an open world to explore, a deeper story, the same serving of oddball minigames, and even a rhythm game or 10 thrown in for good measure. Budi returns—but is he better than ever, or should he be headed back to school for some tough life lessons? We’ll be divulging EVERYTHING in this full review.

Troublemaker 2: Beyond Dream is quite similar to the original game in that it offers beat ’em style combat, a now MORE open world to explore, and a story that attempts to be “edgy and modern,” with everything from lines referring to how characters are spending their time—“jerking off”—to the game’s eye-rolling GIT GUD screen should you be pummeled to defeat in combat or hit by a vehicle. It’s the same attempt at Yakuza-style combat and exploration, humor that wouldn’t feel out of place in Bully, and some light RPG mechanics that allow you to level up your character—or in this case, CHARACTERS—as throughout the game’s 20 main chapters, you’ll switch between Jordan and Budi.

The story is full of no shortage of teenage drama, exploring drug dealers, love interests, and often following Jordan and his band, Beyond Dream, on their many misadventures. Unfortunately, many of the issues that plagued the original game still hinder this sequel from a narrative standpoint, as the script is rife with grammatical errors, repeat dialogue, and quite frankly, it’s all just far less funny when compared to the first game. When switching to Budi, the game follows his quest to become a renowned MMA fighter, even going as far as to place you into an octagon against opponents, though sadly, the combat mostly remains the same as it were in any other encounter.

The main gameplay loop plays out something like this. You are dropped into the sprawling, made-up city of South Jayakarta in Indonesia, and given a main questline to follow, along with a slew of optional side quests which range from fetching someone’s dinner to battling thugs that are wearing VR headsets. The actual navigation of the open world isn’t terrible, with a map that labels all points of interest, and a simple but efficient fast travel system that makes getting around a breeze. Unfortunately, the struggle comes in actually reading menus, as the game uses a close-to-illegible font that I could barely make out even on my 70-plus-inch screen, let alone the Steam Deck. Troublemaker 2 seems to suffer from some sort of resolution glitch, where toggling between different resolutions fails to sharpen the image, making the whole experience look like a blurry mess even when compared to the original game. It runs reasonably well, but the game isn’t all that pleasant to look at, with poor character models, the city itself being rather bland, and characters and objects frequently disappearing before your eyes.

The standout, presentation-wise, would be the hand-drawn portrait art in cutscenes. While not all that animated, the art is at least decent in these scenes. Still, it's hard not to be a bit disappointed in the game's overall visual fidelity. Thankfully, sound design fares significantly better, with a good mix of hard rock songs and other guitar-driven genres, as well as some interactive rhythm games involving Beyond Dream, where you get to press buttons to their ballads in a poorly made minigame.

Much of the developers’ focus seems to have been placed on the combat system, which, like the original, is halfway decent by brawler standards but nothing exceptional. You have an assortment of light and heavy attacks, it’s easy to access menus for healing items during combat, and you can block and parry with relative ease—at least on the game’s default difficulty, of which there are a few to choose between. Unfortunately, while the game throws plenty of battles in your path, whether it be in story segments or random gangs approaching you, they mostly play out the same and don’t require any real thought. Sure, that’s acceptable for many arcade brawlers, but games such as the aforementioned Yakuza have proven this brand of combat can be fun and at least offer a bit of depth. There are upgrades and new skills and moves to unlock, along with the option to use weapons, but for the most part, they don’t add much variety to the combat system, with most battles being solved through brain-dead button combinations. Sick attacks return to try and spice things up, but in the end, Jordan and Budi both play relatively the same, and after a few hours of battling goons, the well runs dry.

It doesn’t help that the pacing of Troublemaker 2 is dreadful. There are ridiculously long load times and save screens, long drawn-out cutscenes full of meandering gibberish that will have you eventually reaching for the skip button—which thankfully does exist—and even when you ARE back into the gameplay, you sometimes have to wait for even more drawn-out phone conversations to conclude before you can actually travel to your next main destination. Troublemaker 2 is a SLOG by every stretch of the word, a game determined to waste as much of your time as possible at every corner.

Hoping to enjoy the game on Steam Deck? You might want to think twice. Sure, it boots up and runs at a somewhat respectable 30–26fps on low settings, but the game looks even worse on Valve’s handheld—which, hey, you expect that on a handheld version—but making that sacrifice stings all the more knowing it’s for a game that just isn’t very fun to play.

While Troublemaker 2 is a larger game than its predecessor, that comes with a great deal of filler content that isn’t fun to participate in, making you wonder—what was the point? The minigames aren’t very fun, the combat encounters feel like the same thing every time, the story is heinous, it doesn’t look good visually, and some of its performance issues feel just downright inexcusable for a 2025 release. I really wanted to like this game because I did at least have some degree of fun with the original, but it feels like Gamecom Team simply tried a copy-and-paste of the first game, tagged on a half-assed story full of now more annoying characters, and filled the open world with nonsense to create the illusion of more being better. It’s all very troubling for this disappointing sequel that may mark the end of a once-promising franchise.

BROKEN LAMP - BELOW AVERAGE