The Sinking City 2 is a strange kind of successful sequel. Frogwares has made a better-reviewed, easier-to-recommend game by stepping away from much of what made the original unusual. The result is sitting at an 81 average on OpenCritic, with 78% of critics recommending it after 59 reviews. Individual scores run from 7/10 at PC Gamer, Shacknews, and Push Square to 9/10 at DualShockers and DayOne.
That spread does not come from critics disagreeing about whether the game works. Most say it does. They disagree about what has been gained, and what has quietly washed away, as Frogwares trades a sprawling detective adventure for a tighter survival horror game.
Released on August 18, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, The Sinking City 2 comes from Ukrainian developer Frogwares. It moves the action to a flooded version of Arkham in 1929, follows a new protagonist, Calvin Rafferty, and requires no knowledge of the 2019 game. This is a sequel in setting and atmosphere more than structure.
The short version: critics agree that The Sinking City 2 has strong atmosphere, tense resource management, grotesque monsters, and a much more competent combat loop than its predecessor. The argument starts when they ask whether its familiar Resident Evil-style structure is worth the loss of deeper investigation and open-ended exploration.
The score range tells only half the story
An 81 average and a 70-to-90 review range look broad enough to suggest a divisive game. Read the reviews, though, and the disagreement is unusually focused. The lower-scoring critics are not calling the game broken or boring. The highest scores are not pretending it has the budget or finish of Capcom's best. Everyone seems to be reviewing the same strengths and limitations, then assigning different weight to each.
Eric Warner at DualShockers gave it 9/10 and called it "an absolute triumph," praising how Frogwares "masterfully crafted a survival horror game as their first product in the genre." The review's listed strengths include its world, combat, enemy design, protagonists, puzzles, and side activities. Its complaints are comparatively narrow: one crash and underdeveloped supporting characters.
At the other end, Jody Macgregor's 70/100 review for PC Gamer says, "While the first's open world outstayed its welcome, the second moved on from the city when I'd only just got my feet wet." That sentence gets to the heart of the split. The sequel solves the first game's sprawl, but perhaps solves it too aggressively. A more focused game can also feel like a smaller one.
Liam Croft at Push Square also landed on 7/10. His verdict calls it "a solid attempt at the classic survival horror formula" with tense resource management and enjoyably absurd puzzles. The qualifier matters. Frogwares has made a respectable Resident Evil-like game, but the performances and production values do not match the genre's largest releases. Croft still concludes that it is "good - sometimes really good."
Shacknews gave another 7/10, describing the game as "a solid evolution for Frogwares" while hoping the studio pushes further at the boundaries of survival horror next time. The criticism is less about failure than caution. The fundamentals are here. The sharper identity may still be one game away.
What reviewers agree works
The clearest consensus is Arkham itself. Frogwares understands wet, rotting cities. Streets disappear beneath black water, interiors feel swollen with damp, and the monsters look as if they were assembled from marine biology and fever dreams. This is more than surface decoration. Survival horror depends on making every room feel slightly unsafe, and critics repeatedly credit the setting with doing that work.
The combat is another major improvement. The first Sinking City had shooting because an action-adventure game was apparently expected to have shooting. It rarely felt good enough to support the encounters built around it. The sequel commits. Ammunition matters, enemies have readable weaknesses, and resource pressure makes a missed shot hurt. DualShockers singled out the combat and enemy design as strengths, while Push Square praised the tension created by managing limited supplies.
TheSixthAxis gave the game 8/10 and said its "more polished and focused gameplay" won the reviewer over. It also noted the obvious Resident Evil influence, including extra challenges that should appeal to completionists and speedrunners. That is a useful observation because it shows how complete the genre switch is. This is not the old detective game with better gunplay bolted on. Its routes, rewards, replay hooks, and item economy have been rebuilt around survival horror.
Investigations have not vanished. They are smaller and more direct, often folded into exploration or presented as optional activities. Several reviews enjoy the puzzles, especially when they lean into pulp occult nonsense. The problem is proportion. Players who like deduction as seasoning may prefer the new balance. Anyone who came for the original's most distinctive system may find the serving thin.
What the 7/10 reviews are protecting
The most interesting criticism is not that The Sinking City 2 copies Resident Evil. Games borrow structures all the time, and Frogwares uses this one capably. The concern is that a recognizable survival horror template can make a peculiar series less peculiar.
The 2019 game was awkward, overextended, and technically rough. It also asked players to investigate without simply following a glowing trail from clue to clue. Its cases could make the player feel lost, which was sometimes deliberate and sometimes just irritating. That friction belonged to its identity. Cleaning it away produces a smoother game, but smoothness is not automatically the same as improvement.
Raider King's review captures the trade clearly. It calls The Sinking City 2 a great survival horror game that can stand beside major releases, then adds that "it is hard not to feel like something was lost in this transition." That is a fair description of a sequel whose best decisions are also its most contentious ones.
PC Gamer's complaint about leaving just as the city became interesting points to a related issue: length and scale. A compact campaign helps pacing and replayability, but critics who wanted to inhabit Arkham rather than clear a route through it felt rushed. Frogwares has built a place reviewers want to see more of, then resisted the temptation to stretch it. Depending on your tolerance for padding, that sounds either disciplined or frustrating.
Production limits remain visible. Push Square mentions performances that fall below the genre's top tier. Other reviews note technical roughness and a lack of polish beside games such as Silent Hill 2. These do not appear to sink the experience, but they keep the imitation from feeling seamless. When a game invites comparison to the best-known survival horror series, every stiff animation and plain conversation becomes easier to notice.
Why the 9/10 reviews are willing to forgive it
The positive case is simple: Frogwares chose a manageable target and hit it. The studio did not merely make the old combat less bad. It built a horror game whose exploration, scarce resources, monsters, puzzles, and environmental storytelling support one another. That is a substantial reinvention, especially for a developer making its first full commitment to this form.
DualShockers' 9/10 is not based on novelty alone. Its review praises specific fundamentals: satisfying encounters, memorable protagonists, side activities, and a world worth exploring. DayOne also scored it 9/10, calling it "an exceptional videogame" that deserves a place among great sequels. Those verdicts treat the genre change as confidence rather than retreat. Frogwares identified the parts it could improve and built around them.
There is another reason critics respond warmly. The game was developed by a Ukrainian studio during Russia's continuing invasion. That context should not replace criticism, and DualShockers explicitly argues for the game on its craft. It does, however, make the finished work difficult to separate from the conditions of its creation. The fact that it arrived as a coherent, ambitious release is part of the critical conversation without needing to become a free pass.
The strongest reviews also seem more comfortable judging this game on what it is rather than what the series used to be. If you have no attachment to the first game's investigative ambitions, a focused 1920s cosmic horror adventure with solid combat and an 81 aggregate is an easy proposition. The loss becomes visible mainly when you compare structures.
Is The Sinking City 2 worth playing?
The critical consensus says yes, with a specific warning about expectations. Come for a compact survival horror game set in a memorable flooded Arkham, not a larger detective sandbox. Expect scores clustered around 7/10 to 9/10, an OpenCritic average of 81, and a game that critics recommend more often than they reject.
Players who value atmosphere, resource pressure, environmental puzzles, and grotesque creature design are the safest audience. So are horror fans who can accept some stiff performances and AA-scale polish. Players who loved the first game because it let them work through elaborate cases may be disappointed by how much investigation now sits at the edges.
That makes The Sinking City 2 worth recording as more than a number. A three-star reaction from someone mourning the old detective systems can be as informative as a four-and-a-half-star reaction from someone thrilled by the new combat. Perthro lets you rate games on a five-star scale, write reviews of any length, and keep custom lists for the games you want to revisit. It is free on the App Store for iPhone and requires iOS 17.0 or later.
The score spread is real, but the argument underneath it is better than "good versus bad." Critics mostly agree Frogwares made a stronger game. They are deciding whether it also made a less distinctive one. That tension is exactly why The Sinking City 2 is more interesting than its respectable 81 average suggests.
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