Game #1065: Dungeons & Dragons - Dark Alliance

  To the dungeons with this one!

 While I haven't played the Dark Alliance games yet, it is a series that I plan on eventually trying out. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was a game that instantly caught my attention the day I learned about it, so I purchased it day one. Then they announced that couch co-op would be patched in later down the line, which immediately raised red flags: Clearly, the game wouldn't be finished at launch. The game came out, and so did the reviews and... in some ways it's better than you'd think, in others it's as bad as people have made it out to be.

 D&D:DA is, plain and simple, a dungeon crawler looter, in the same vein as Diablo, but it does things its own way. You can pick from four pre-defined, uncustomizable characters, made up of two fighters, and archer and a rogue that plays like another fighter. It sorta feels like a beat'em up at times, thanks to the third-person camera and how the game plays, for y'see, R1 and R2 can be mixed together to perform different combos. As you level up, you can use money to unlock new moves by inputting or holding down different directions as you tap R1 or R2, giving it a very unique feel among dungeon crawlers. To further aid you in combat, you can press Square after basic attacks to perform more powerful, gauge-consuming attacks, you can hold down L1 to block or tap it before getting hit to parry attacks and open up enemies and you even get an evade. Landing hits fills up your Ultimate gauge, which can then be used on the previously mentioned Square attacks or by pressing L1+R1 to perform your Ultimate move. Lastly, characters have up to eight different skills, but you can only equip two at a time, one by tapping triangle and the other one by holding down triangle. In paper, I'm sure this sounds really cool, and at times, it actually feels fun, at least when playing as Drizzt, but....

 ....where should I start? Firstly, the AI is downright idiot. They love standing in place while you go to town on them or on their buddies. Sometimes the engine works in hilariously mysterious ways, enemies might go out flying to the skies after you hit them or they might behave like a runt out of Hokuto no Ken, standing in place for a few seconds before realizing that they are already dead. And even though enemies are this stupid, at least on single player, the game can have some ridiculous difficulty spikes, so that even if your 'power counter' is way above the recommended level, you'll still get absolutely demolished in a few seconds because enemies get such a ridiculous power boost. It's hard to gauge if you should tackle a higher difficulty level BEFORE trying out the level, and exiting a level only to retry it again on a lower difficulty level feels like such a waste of time. It's also a waste of time because lowering the difficulty lowers the XP rewards and the loot rewards, so strengthening your character slows down to a crawl.

 And leaving that aside, some mechanics are just broken or poorly designed. The lock-on camera is a must if you don't want your combos to hit thin air after a few strikes, but... locking onto an enemy gives you this awkward below-the-waist angle that makes it impossible to see your surroundings as you pummel an enemy. There's also a stamina gauge that governs your basic attacks and your evades. Why is there a Stamina gauge on a dungeon crawler? It's a dumb mechanic, and the cherry on top is that as you expend it... it's maximum amount will go down, and you'll only be able to fix the cap by random enemy drops, by drinking a potion or by toggling a checkpoint. It's such a dumb mechanic. It was probably put in place to have the player consider toggling a checkpoint, for y'see, after some enemy waves a Rest point might spawn, which you can use to restock your consumables, trigger a checkpoint and heal your life and stamina gauges, however, not using them makes the rarity of the loot you find higher. Thing is... I never used them. And even then it still felt like most of the stuff I was finding was garbage.

 But the stamina gauge isn't even the game's worst design choice. How about the way the game doles out experience? Defeating enemies helps a tiny bit... a bit, but 75% of the XP you earn is obtained by finishing a level. You could skip most enemies and you'd miss out on very little extra XP. Oh, and you might've guessed it by now... you only get XP after finishing a level, so no mid-stage leveling up or allocating stat points. Lame. This also holds true for loot, you can't check what you found until you finish a level, so no mid-stage swapping, which is also so incredibly lame.

 And the money you obtain? Well, you can use it to purchase new moves, strengthen restockable items(Mostly potions) or change the color of some equipment pieces, but funnily enough, the store has no items or equipment for you to buy. Equipment can only be found or sold, not purchase. Why? That said, different equipment pieces do reflect on the character model, which was pretty cool, and every character has their own set of unique-looking equipment, so I'll give it that. The final bit of praise I'll give the game is that the cutscenes look REALLY good, they are very well animated.

 Oh, and I'm not proud to admit it, but I rage-quitted the game, the bugs got too bad. I mean, at some point trolls started spawning on the air, and they wouldn't attack, so I could only kill them with ranged attacks, which was boring, but their drops would also fall higher up on the air, which was annoying. This bug with the trolls was pretty frequent. Not as frequent as the enemy life bars just disappearing for no good reason... or the AI disappearing as previously mentioned. Oh, and one type of cape for Drizzt's would NEVER display properly on the inventory screen. I don't know if I should count it as a bug, but sometimes it felt as if pressing square wouldn't register when I tried to grab loot when moving, I think it has to do with a few seconds of input delay that the game suffers from. What does count as a bug is the fact that the game crashed on me. Twice. I lost over half an hour of progress both times and had to replay dungeons. It was super boring. But the cherry on top was when I was exploring a level and... Drizzt fused with the environment. No mid-level saving, no 'reload last checkpoint' and no way to get out of the environmnet.... yeah, I had enough of the game, so I just rage quitted.

 It's definitely not the worst game ever made, I can see a lot of potential in the combat engine, and I know that some care went into designing the various equipment pieces for the character models, plus, the cutscenes are a thing of beauty. But even so, the game suffers from so many poor design choices as well as a slew of bugs that go from funny and harmless to downright frustrating, making it extremely hard to recommend, even to fans of the genre.

 3.5