Being a fan of Blizzard's Diablo series, I was intrigued when I first heard of Gas Powered Games' action RPG, Dungeon Siege. From all accounts, it was a Diablo-esque game with ramped up graphics and sound, and the ability to completely control up to eight player characters (and/or mules!) at a time. My first reaction, upon hearing about all this hack-and-slash goodness, was, "Sign me up!"
The basic idea of Dungeon Siege is that your character is a farmer whose village has just been destroyed by some nasty folks. Your character, being one of the only folks spared by the evil Krug, has to go to a neighboring town and warn them of the impending invasion. This kicks off an epic quest to save the world and what not.
As one can tell from my previous outpouring of enthusiasm, the story is not particularly engaging. It mainly consists of getting to one town, finding it in disarray, and then being sent (usually through a dungeon which is teeming with monsters) to the next town, and so on and so forth. If you're looking for a deep RPG with tons of back story and nuances, look elsewhere; you're not going to find that with Dungeon Siege.
What you will find, though, is a ton of monster-slashing, evil being-torching action, and Dungeon Siege drops you into that right away. Upon creating your initial character, you are given a knife and a bow and sent on your way. Each character has an active slot for a melee weapon and a ranged weapon (beginning with the aforementioned knife and bow) as well as two spells, which fall into the categories of combat magic and nature magic. The former is generally destructive spells like fireballs and acid gas, while the latter is more controlled magic like electric shocks and toxic spores. Basically, you pick one of these four weapons or spells for your character to wield, and then you go to town, clicking away.
The interesting thing is how the characters develop. Unlike the Diablo games, where your character can be improved in any way you deem fit regardless of what your character is actually using, your characters in Dungeon Siege advance in accordance with what types of attacks they're using the most. For example, if you specialize in melee attacks, then your strength and melee skill will advance accordingly. Similarly, if your forte is in the deadly art of fireballs, your combat magic skill and intelligence will increase. This is good at first, but the problem is that you’re basically locked into your choices early on, as it's very hard to go back and improve another skill after you've gotten a few levels in one. The other option, being creating a jack of all trades, simply creates a useless character in later levels.
This fact is balanced out by the party system that the game employs, allowing you to have up to eight characters under your control. What ends up happening is that you end up creating a party of disparate characters who can cover for each others' weaknesses. So you can have a group of melee fighters covered by a couple of archers and spell-flinging sorcerers, along with one wizard casting healing spells in the back. It can work out well, assuming you can assemble the right mix, and you can hire extra characters at the towns along the way to round out your party. You can also buy pack mules, which basically are just walking treasure chests, but are fairly vulnerable to attack because of their tendency to lumber into incoming assaults. Of course, like any pet, my fiancée and I, while playing, became quite attached to our pack mule (his name was Midnight, by the way), to the point of restoring saved games should he fall prey to the ugly, nasty monsters.
This is all well and good, but things start to fall apart when actually getting into the game. It's fairly early on when you realize that, unlike Diablo, you don't actually need to click on your enemies in order for your party to attack them. What results is that you basically just set your characters' attacks and movement behavior, and then let them go to town. This is fine and convenient at first, but once you realize that you have little involvement in the actual game, it gets tedious. What happened is that the computer ended up having more fun from Dungeon Siege than I did; your involvement becomes limited to giving the characters a direction to walk in and pressing the button to drink potions so they won't die or stop casting spells. Now, some people inevitably will be able to get into this sort of a game, as the control is fairly effortless. However, at around ten hours of gameplay, I found no reason to continue playing; I'd grown tired of repeatedly inching forward, killing a few monsters, healing, and then beginning the whole process over again.
This is compounded by the fact that there is no town portal to speak of in the game. You are expected to buy everything you need for the next leg of the journey at each town you pass; if you underestimate, then you're limited to your characters' slow health and mana regeneration and the potions you might find along the way, which are few and far between. Thus the healing stage becomes a game of "hurry up and wait," as it were, which unnecessarily drags out the game and adds to the tedium.
Technically, the game is quite stunning. Even on my struggling Celeron 550, the game looks quite impressive, with lushly detailed landscapes and animated characters and monsters. Though the framerate dropped considerably with an excess of movement on the screen, I was still very impressed with Dungeon Siege's graphical output. About the only complaint I had about the game graphically is that the camera control has a tendency to add to your confusion and get you quite lost if you turn around too much, and the map is often of little help because it's basically just a shrunken-down representation of the actual landscape. The zoom, in dungeons, often doesn't go out far enough for you to be able to see where you're going. All in all, though, the graphics are top-notch.
Sound is equally impressive. The music is cinema-quality, with inspiring scores that change in tempo as you approach danger, much like a good fantasy movie. Sound effects are equally true to life, from the clang of melee weapons to the sickening crawling noises of giant spiders. Dungeon Siege truly creates an captivating environment for you to play in.
It's only too bad that said environment isn't so much fun to play in, else Dungeon Siege would be a five-star title for sure. Unfortunately, given the repetitive nature of the game, plus some technical difficulties involving random crashes on startup (which may have had something to do with my aging computer, but should still not freeze up my computer half the time when starting up), I can't give Dungeon Siege more than a half-hearted recommendation. If you're looking for some simple, mindless action, the Dungeon Siege should be your cup of tea. If a deeper, more engaging experience is what you're looking for, then this Dungeon is empty.
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