Dungeon Siege is a Diablo clone from Microsoft. Even though it has better graphics and more camera control than Diablo II, the game itself just doesn’t have that addictive quality that Blizzard knows how to instill in its games.
This game starts out with you working on a farm. An old man stumbles towards you and collapses while warning about an invasion of monsters. As soon as he finished speaking, you have to grab whatever weapon you can find and start killing everything in sight. Your first goal is to fight your way toward a town and find out what is going on. Completing this goal will take a minimum half hour of game time.
Taking thirty minutes to complete the first goal may not be such a big deal, except with this game it is thirty minutes of repetitive boring action. During this time, there is no story development and your character will only increase in skill by small amounts. Instead of working in some kind of strategy or more variation to the game, the developers at Microsoft just piled on more and more enemies. Dungeon Siege has an awful tendency to become tedious after about thirty minutes of gameplay. In other words, as soon as I finished the first goal, I was already tired of playing.
Your characters don’t progress using a standard experience point system like most role playing games. Instead, you build up your skills depending on the weapons you use. While this may seem like a good idea, I found a major lack of balance between the characters. Archers are at a major advantage so long as they have some meathead to step up and take all the hits for them. This means you need to beef up one guy with the most skill points in close-quarters combat and give him the best armor, then let him be the target while your archers do the most damage. I also noticed that my archers, even at a very low level, almost never miss, while my higher level swordsmen will swing and swing and only land an occasional blow. You can also use magic to fight enemies, but it takes so long to build up that I never bothered exploring this option. This game is too hack-n-slash to get into spellcasting.
Another major problem is the way the other members of your party move around. The AI needs some work. For example, I have a party of four characters – my main guy, a dwarf fighter, and two archers. If I enter combat with a bunch of enemies, my dwarf will sometimes walk through an enemy to attack from the other side. If we’re up against a bunch of opponents, instead of having all my people on one side of the fight, the dwarf will end up right in the middle of a group of monsters and taking eight or nine hits at a time. It is a bug that he can walk through the enemies, because when I try to get him back on the other side, he is stuck because he’s surrounded. When this happens, I can either hope he has enough power to kill them all before they get to him, otherwise I will waste a bunch of healing potions just to keep him alive. In most cases, you will be fighting at least a half dozen or more opponents at once, so this walk-through problem is a steadily recurring issue.
There are way too many items in this game and most of them aren’t worth getting. You will literally wade through tons of potions and weapons and armor that you will never use because they aren’t worth half what you’re already carrying. Crates and barrels are stashed in nearly every corner and they rarely contain anything worthwhile. Going through all this stuff just takes away from the game, plus it clutters up the screen with items. You will find tons of gold pieces, but it takes literally hours of gameplay in between opportunities to actually buy anything.
The graphic engine in Dungeon Siege is very well done and resembles that of Bungie’s Myth II: Soulblighter, but with much more detail. The level of detail in the landscapes is very nice, especially in the forest areas. Some environmental effects, like smoke and rain, also enhance the arena. However, I feel like the excellent graphic engine is not worthy of this game. It deserves to be in something much better. I did like that they are no fixed camera angles. You can spin around to get a complete 360-degree view of the area and also zoom in and out of the action.
The sound in this game is not too bad and the voice work is nicely done even though you don’t hear too much of it. While you are playing, you will mostly just hear combat sounds like arrows and swords landing on enemies, and the occasional grunt and moan as monsters go down. There is some music, but it doesn’t add much to the experience. You could just turn the sound off and listen to music and you won’t miss anything. Everything about this game is visual, and I have not seen any place where a sound effect was used to indicate any kind of warning or happening.
Dungeon Siege could have been a great game, but it suffers from excess. Too many enemies to kill, too many items to sort through, too long to finish levels, and too much time in between goals. On a console system, this would be the type of game you could finish in just a few hours, but the developers chose to drag everything out to where the fun is lost in tedium.
Note: If you still want to buy Dungeon Siege, don’t bother buying the original – get the expansion instead. The expansion actually comes with the original game, and I saw it at Wal-Mart today for $19.98.
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