Dungeon Siege

"A game that brings many mixed feelings to mind. It's sadly not an RPG as marketed."

Dungeon Siege, Chris Taylor's take on the RPG genre. Or so it's been said by countless previews and in some reviews, and in all the marketing hype that built up to its release. But what about the game behind all of that? After all the hype is stripped off, and the sense of wonder wears off what we have here is not exactly the title that was promised. Dungeon Siege is a game of extremes. It is hard to find a single quality that has a middle ground as most areas of the game go into simple love it or hate it categories. The problem is that in the end, all the love/hate categories end up making this into an average title at most. Great ideas, horrible execution in the end.

Graphics Score: 9.5

Impressive. You will be very hard pressed to find another video game out there with more impressive visuals than this one. Sure, there are games out there with better character models and others out there with more impressive water effects. But when you take into account all that DS brings to the table in the graphical department, it's astounding. Character models look great, and you can see every item you have equipped on them modeled with extreme attention to detail and care. Water ripples and looks crystalline and alluring, all the while serving up some impressive lighting effects. The complex shadows look a bit pixelated, yet they are handled very impressively. Oh and those cliffs and elevated regions! The sense of height is amazing and imposing as you scale some cliff and move your viewpoint around, offering amazing and jaw dropping vistas. All in all, you will not be disappointed on this category, so it's a great showpiece for that new video card or for your altogether new gaming rig.

Sound Score: 8.0

Jeremy Soule composed the soundtrack to this game, and as usual, he shows that he has a remarkable talent for putting in the right tunes for the moment. You won't forget the main theme for a long time, and I even found myself tracking down a ''Tank Viewer'' program in order to extract the soundtrack and listen to it out of game. If I were to review that portion of the game alone, I'd give it a 10. But this also comes with the sound effects. And this were not as impressive. Oh, they still sound great, and EAX technology is used to great effect. You can really tell when you're inside a cave as opposed to outdoors, so that is handled very well. Unfortunately, the grunts that your enemies make during a fight are very very annoying and repetitive. GPG also seems to have used some sort of common sound library for many things because I recognized quite a few sounds (such as the one when you gulp down a potion) from other video games. The voice acting is also hard to like, luckily you won't be subjected to much of it. At least the dwarf sounded just like I'd expect a dwarf to sound, so that was great.

User Friendliness: 8.0

I'd actually give this category a 10 if you could quick equip more spells as 2 are not enough, and at high level a magic using character really has no use for the melee and ranged weapon slots but oh well. The rest of the controls are great however, and the user interface is extremely simple to use and streamlined to the max. Which bring us to the main problem with the game...

Actual Gameplay: 3.0

Ouch, serious downer after the previous scores eh? But why? Well, here is the main problem with Dungeon Siege. Remember how I previously mentioned that the interface is extremely streamlined and easy to work with? Well, for some reason the programmers decided that's the way the whole game should work. So here we have a video game that is a joy to look at, a marvel to listen to, and a sheer pleasure to grasp its controls. But once all that wears off, you realize that there isn't much to do about the game itself as a player. You click for everything, which is not unusual in a computer game, but this game takes it to an exaggerated extreme. And sadly, you don't really even get involved in the evolution of your ingame persona. The game markets itself as you building up the skills you use to win, so naturally one would think it means ''well, if I want a character to be a healer, I'll stick with healing magic with him, or if I want a character to be a great archer I'll stick to bows''. The problem is the way the programmers ''balanced'' this. The healer character mentioned previously is not getting anywhere on his knowledge of Nature spells or in his Intelligence (required for Mana and for equipping caster items) unless he specifically uses certain spells. Yes, he can level up Nature magic by using any Nature spell but he will be 10, 15, 20 levels behind your other characters unless he uses the specific damage spell Flash. My archer character used a bow that was not as high damage as some others but I liked it because it looked good and had a life stealing feature and the arrows it shot had a nice green color particle effect. His Range skill level and his Dexterity were going up way slower than the melee's levels were going in their skills and I was frustrated. Then out of curiosity I decided to switch to a slightly higher damage bow that was nowhere near as much ''fun'' as the other bow he was using and what would you know, the skills started going up as fast as the other character's skills were. Ok, so I choose the skills I want to go up by using them, but only, and -only- if I do it with the specific spells or weapons the programmers want me to? It's probably a bug, but a very frustrating one nonetheless.

Replayability: 2.0

Maybe you like multiplayer, personally I don't do much of that. I bought a game sold as an RPG, not as a multiplayer only title anyway. Maybe if you could save a multiplayer game in progress.. but you can't. You just save your character (like the original Diablo on the Sony Playstation if you did not have enough memory card space to save the whole game). As for the single player experience, there's not much to do. You start, are given some ''quests'' along the way which are very simple and you will complete without even realizing you did them. The whole game feels like an old Arcade shooter, like Aero Fighters. Except that you don't dodge bullets as efficiently due to the mouse controls (and the bullets in this case are spells and arrows), and that instead of getting a button with a screen clearing mega bomb, you get a button that makes you drink a health potion. Now, the Siege Editor could have livened this up a LOT, but the game shipped without it. And it was made available too late. By the time the editor was made available, the game had already shown its really shallow nature. And much better titles released (or are real close to release in some other cases).

Final Evaluation: 6.0

After the low gameplay and replayability scores why a slightly above average final score? Truth be told, the game is impressive in certain areas, so that ups the score a bit. And the game CAN be fun when played in short intervals. When I got it, I played it in 3 hour chunks and that worked. Then those became 1 hour chunks. Currently I can't stand playing it for more than 40 minutes, but if I want a quick fix of stress relief before doing something time consuming, it's just perfect. Mindless, fast, not many brain cells involved. That's the game's biggest weakness, but also possibly its biggest strength. I'd really recommend it at a budget price. buying it for the full $49.99 though it's something I wouldn't have done if I had known better. Sadly, I spent that money expecting an RPG. I got something not quite an RPG, and not quite anything like I was expecting. But at least it's a good fix to play when I get home after a long day and just want 20 minutes of stress relief as opposed to losing the evening in front of the monitor.

Oh, and it makes a great soundtrack CD once you extract the music files and burn them, can't forget that detail! And maybe, just maybe, some people will be able to mod it into something good and fun. With the late release of the mod tools though, I wouldn't be surprised if the people that would have done good modifications for DS would just turn their attentions to other titles.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/27/02, Updated 05/27/02