Dungeon Siege
Game Play 2 out 5
Replayablity 3 out 5
Graphics 5 out 5
Sound 3 out 5
Details 3 out 5
Fun Factor 3 out 5
Dungeon Siege came highly recommended, otherwise I wouldn't have bought a MS produced game. It didn't live up to it's high billing though.
Yes, this game is good looking, really good looking, takes graphics to a new level good looking. But other then that it's a simplistic and shallow game.
First, the good part. The graphics are stunning, with the best forest areas I have ever seen in a game. Each of the games regions has it's own graphics style, from the snow covered hills of Glacern to the misty Eastern Swamp to the sun baked desert near the Cliffs of Fire.
The monsters and heros are highly detailed, with multiple attack and defend motions. The apperance of the heros reflect what gear they are using, and there is a wide range of armor and weapons for them to use.
Unfortunatly once you get past the graphics you discover the game doesn't have much more going for it. The sound is OK, and the music is a bit better then average but nothing spectacular. The manual is resonable but doesn't go into any of the details. The game is resonably stable, but did lock up on ocassion. The game interface is average quality, with an extra dose of eye candy.
Then you get to the bad core of this game. The actual game mechanics are overly simplistic. Splistic to the point I have 1st players shooters with more complex game systems. Worse, the game mechanics have some serious flaws and oddities that get in the way of the games primary function.
The characters in this game have 3 stats and 4 skills. Melee skill is tied to strength, ranged skill is tied to dexterity and both combat and nature magic are tied to intelligence. Characters in Dungeon Siege don't have a class, rather they go up in whatever skills and stats they use the most. Use hand to hand weapons all the time and your stregth will shoot up, your dexterity will rise a bit and your intelligence with go up every blue moon or so.
Melee weapons and armor require a certain amount of strength to use, ranged weapons require a certain amount of dexterity and spells have an intelligence requirement. The end result of which is the characters really need to pick one skill and stat and work that up to the exclusion of others. You can try to build a balanced character but the end result will be a character who isn't as good at anything and can't use any good gear.
There is a wide range of gear for your character to use. But the real differences between gear seems limited compared to Diablo II. There are fewer types of bonuses, with less real effect on the game then in Diablo II. The end result is that there is no difference between a mace and a sword beyond their graphics.
The end result of all of this so far is a lot like Diablo II except it's not as complex. But then we get into the ugly. There are a few things in this game that really make you wonder what the designers where thinking.
The game world is so straight forward that it's impossible to get lost. There are very few side dungeons to explore and most are 1 or 2 rooms in size. Most of the areas consist of a single straight line to explore going from the entrance, through the dungeon and out the exit which takes you to the start of the next area. The game doesn't have a real map but for the most part you won't miss it because there simply is noplace to get lost.
The games plot is equally linear, for the most part the people that give you quests won't even recognize that you have finished them if you do go back for some reason. You could litterally play the game without backtracking at all if you didn't need to sell the stuff you had picked up and restock your potions.
Characters gain experience based on the damage they do and the damage they suffer. The end result is that your melee fighters will get more then the rest of your characters and the ones you have assigned to healing will get far less. This effect was bad enough that towards the end I was forced to do stupid stuff just to get my healer experience. At one point I had the other 7 characters in my party all set to do nothing by cast heal and had my healer do all of the fighting to try and get his experience up.
The game comes with two worlds, one designed for single player and one that can only be played in multiplayer mode. In multiplay mode you can't have any NPC characters at all, one character per person playing the game. Given the way the game is designed around multiple character parties this means that half of the game is useless for people that don't want to play online. Even worse it doesn't appear that you can save your game or characters at all in multiplayer mode.
For most of the game my tactics consisted of nothing but selecting a monster and hitting the 'use healing potion' button from time to time. There is little point in trying to develop more detailed tactics because you can't block the monsters from getting to your mages and there doesn't seem to be any distinction between types of damage at all. Towards the end I was forced into a more complex tactic of 'bait one or two monsters out at a time' to avoid being swarmed and the ocassional 'ignore the melee monster because the ranged monsters are doing all the damage' but that was it for tactics. All of the boss monsters turned out to be endurance matches to see if I had brought enough healing potions with me.
Speaking of monsters, a constant anoyance was that the smal monsters where usually the most dangerous. Many of the large monsters simply have a lot of hit points and lack an effetive attack. Small monsters didn't have a lot of hit points but often had deadly attacks and would swarm the party in groups of 4 or 5 at a time. This is doubly annoying because many of the small monsters are small enough to be hard to see or select as a target.
Basicly, the end result is that it's real pretty and actually fun to play for a while because it's fun to watch the fighting and look at the pretty world. But it also starts to wear thin quickly because the underlying game is so shallow. Think of it as the anti-nethack.
Jay
