Finally! A D&D game that is in downloadable form on the XBLA published by Atari. Sounds to me when you have an equation like that you really can’t go wrong. Unfortunately, I wish I was right.
When first playing this game the excitement that I had built up from being a huge table top D&D fan quickly left as I started to play the game. The story line to the game is incoherent fr anyone who is not a fan of D&D and depending on your level of faboyism, you might not be able to follow it anyway. Trying to put the story to the side, do you really need a great story for a Dungeon crawler game? Let’s say we don’t. Moving on, being a D&D game, I was excited to make my character. Little did I know that the options of the character builder would be a huge let down right out of the gate. You have four set races you can be that already have set classes. There are no options to mix and match class and race. Because all the classes seems like a poor choice to me, I went with a human warrior. Not that picking anything different would have changed my experience.
The gameplay in the game is just horrendous. The combat system is simplified into a couple of button pushes. Of course being a dungeon game you have to find that loot. There are several pick ups you make along the way that allows this as well as random drops from enemies. Leveling up will take forever and the further you get in the game the more you are forced to fight higher level enemies when you or your weapons just are not ready. This may not be a problem on other games, but here it presents a huge one. The auto save feature may as well have been left out of the game. I can’t tell you the number of time I would get 20 or 30 minutes into a level or quest and die because of relentless AI that was higher level than me and I had forgotten to save. Time to start all over again because apparently the auto save decided not to work. Your attacks and defenses feel slow and the camera angles are not pleasant at some points in the game. I also experienced several freeze ups that lasted for 30 seconds all the way to 2 minutes, but never a system freeze.
Even for a downloadable title on the XBLA the graphics are less than par with what we have come to expect from such main stream titles. The game feels like you’re moving in slow motion more often than not. The frame rate feels laggy and it drags. Lots of blurring in the combat and if more than 7 enemies or so get on the screen at once, be prepared for some serious slow down issues. Character animation are just not there, even in the parts that are supposed to be translated as cinematics. Even those are less than anything I enjoyed. They remind me of cheap motion comics at best and by the time you listen to whats being said with a combination of watching it, you’re ready to skip by it.
The sound, well there seems to be no sound that is worth listening too. There are no sounds in the game as you talk to people you may run into questing, only grunt and sighs. Like I stated before, there is voice acting, but unfortunately the only thing you think of when you hear the characters talk in the classic RPG dialog that most people stereo type D&D fans for doing. The combat sounds are bland and the game soundtrack is mostly a series of long bass lines and brass making every minute of the game feel like either something huge is going to happen or it may make you fall to sleep waiting for the moment.
All in all, I appreciate the effort that was put into trying to make this game for D&D fans and Dungeon crawler fans alike, but for it’s very unreasonable asking price of 1200 MS points it’s just not worth it. Due to a combination of a whole lot of things going wrong this game just does not meet the expectations of what the fans are wanting. Maybe if this game does happen to sale enough for us to see the second part of this supposed trilogy it will be better than the product that we got this time.
