Dungeon Siege

He brought us Total Annihilation, now he's trying his hand at the somewhat under appreciated genre of the hack 'n slash. The he I am referring to is Chris Taylor, a great man whose works are very overlooked by the popular classics of our time.

The story follows you, the character, as most Hack 'n Slashes do, the premise of the story is that you family got killed by some evil doers called the Krug, who are generally a stupid race who live in the woods, when your family is slaughtered you are given the quest to race to town and warn them of what has transpired. Pretty straight forward, but upon reaching Town it turns out the Krug have attacked them as well, but for some very strange reason that I somehow missed or they never told me, you don't go back to your farm, instead you take it upon yourself to slay as many Krug as stand in your path (que foreboding music).
Also the game pretty much tells you that you are to save the world, which again I found slightly strange, but over all the story is nice enough to keep you playing, even if it is just there to draw you into some out of the way path that is full of menacing denizens of the dark.

The layout of the world is a very strong salute of sorts to the old school RPG's of yore, because the world in no way is practical. Most RPGs now tend to stick to believable geography which inturn leads to either very strenuous running between areas to find a different type of scenery, or your stuck with one type the entire time. Dungeon Siege however gives you a new look scenery almost every time you finish a dungeon, which is nice. It also helps to reason why the world only has one main street, which is easily blocked so sends people into the dark.

The game features no classes, which is nice, considering I doubt a Farmer would of dabbled into palladia in between crops. So at the beginning of the game you have four choices, well actually three choices but the forth comes up rather quickly. The choices are either to become a melee fighter, a ranged fighter, and a combat magic fighter (as mentioned it takes a little longer to find the fourth option, which is nature magic). Or you can dabble and do all of them.

Although this isn't a new idea, it's a seminally new idea in the world of the Hack 'n Slash where you are usually given a class to play as. I found that the system didn't work unless you liked to get a bruising more often than not at the beginning of the game. I found that a straight Melee fighter was most effective, i.e. a Tanker. Or a combination of a Melee fighter and a Ranged Fighter, leaving the other paths for NPC's id pick up along the way (more on that).

The basic idea of the game is to hack and slash as many ugly's as you can, while collecting more items, gold and potions, and of course "levelling". I placed levelling in quotes because the game doesn't really feature a Level Up, instead after a while using a weapon or magic you become more learned in it and so gain a level, you also gain stats by using a particular weapon or magic, melee weapons = more strength, magic = more intelligence.

During the game you can pick up NPC's, they are usually found in towns towards the end of beginning of a new chapter of the game. Most will join you for free, where as some will join you for a fee, the fee is sometimes high depending on your gold management and their skills. Most of the time the ones you have to pay are highly experienced in a few areas but the free ones are all rounders or weaker. I preferred getting the free ones, not because I was cheap but because most of the time the Mercenary's were arrogant sounding, which put me off getting them.

At the beginning of the game you will be mostly slaughtering Krug, but as the game progresses you will fight Skeletons, some Yeti, and even a few Dragons. The variety of monsters is quite substantial and all are very nice looking if I do say so myself.

One major grip I had with the game was the camera, most of the time you have to control it yourself but the worst thing is that if you go to close to the games boundaries the camera takes it upon itself to zoom right into your heroes face, effectively blinding you until you manage to get it back under control. This wouldn't be so bad, if it didn't happen in the middle of a fight. Also mentioning fights the camera sometimes just swings around mid battle, I am unsure if this was some sort of intended mechanism to give you the best view of the action or some misguided camera action, but what ever it was it becomes highly annoying for quite a while until you can fully control and anticipate the cameras sometimes erratic control.

Graphically the game is very nice, although the frame rate is not very high the game still looks a beaut when playing it. Graphically it is a head and a skip above most of its competition, but as most developers know in the Genre of hack 'n slash graphics don't mean diddly squat.

The games backgrounds are very lush and packed with stuff, the developers went to every effort it seems to make the world at least believable in its geography (not the world layout though). When running through the forest the ground is covered with leaves and shrubs as trees shoot up around you. Of the games environments I found the forests the most enjoyable and also the most believable in a game for a long time.

Monsters also look a charm; although as the style of hack 'n slash you will fight a continuous wave of twin monsters for a while they didn't get tiring or annoying at all, maybe because I was hacking them or because they looked very nice.

The game also has nice environmental effects, such as snow when you are on the mountains, and a thick mist. Although they are not random effects they still look very nice and are enjoyable to view.

Spell effects also get two thumbs up, from the small to the big almost all the spells have very nice effects.

The games sound is a major let down compared to everything else in the title. The only high point was the voice acting, but even that wore thin in a lot of the time. All of the main roles were well scripted and spoken but some of the others were a bit off the mark.

Although this is more of a pet peeve than a criticism but the Dwarves are Scottish, I don't know where it says it but its some sort of prerequisite to making a game is to make the Dwarves Scottish.

Aside from the sometimes-off voice acting the music department must have taken a budget hit during game development, as the games music is very dreary in places and repetitive. The snow area music in this reviewer's opinion is the worst snow music. When playing I thought they had stolen the music transcript from IceWind Dale 2, then tore out a couple of the lines of song leaving just a few chimes, needless to say it sounded quite bad.

The main quest is quite long, especially for a Hack 'n Slash, but afterwards there isn't much point to play though again, unless you wish to try as another type of warrior or get more items. But aside from that there isn't much as the games main quest doesn't change.

The game also features multiplayer over the Internet, which for avid Dungeon Siege fans will be a lifesaver and add hundreds of hours to the game. But over all the games last ability isn't really there.

System Requirements - Windows XP/2000/Me/98 - 128 MB RAM. Processor - 333 MHz. Hard Drive - 1GB. Video Card 8 MB/3D. Other - DirectX 8 compatible sound card with speakers/headphones. Online/multiplayer requirements - 56 kbs modem for 1-4 players; broadband or LAN for 5+.