Dungeon Siege

"A Fun Game.... For Awhile"

Just to get it out of the way, my name is xbxfan. I am not a fan boy, and I love all systems. This review isn’t biased. I played and beat this game a short time ago. I am now reviewing it to let you know how I felt about it. I have never given any game a ten in my years as a gamer due to the simple fact that, there are no perfect games available. I didn’t even give Diablo 2 a ten. There are glitches, frame problems, and other problems in ALL games. Anyway, in this game there in no real back-story as it is the first game in, hopefully a series of games (like Final Fantasy). They are currently in development for the second one. In this game, you create a character and are thrown into the world. You get quests to accomplish, and the first is to find a certain guy that will help you. That is where the fun starts.

Gameplay (8/10)- When you start this game there are little pop-ups that show you how to use the controls. I turned them off after a few of them because they stop the gameplay to show you. The controls are that of a normal RPG. Even if it isn’t quite like Diablo, there is the basic left click (action), right click (various), and the scroll on the mouse (if you have one) is zoom in and out (there are other buttons to zoom, but I had a scroll mouse so I didn’t care). They are very easy to use, and after a little while, master. There are a lot of short keys, like M, to refill your mana, and H to refill your health. There are some others like disband member or group, which I never use, and many, many others. This game is quite easy, and I have never had a member in my party die. It is a basic hack-and-slash, where it is mostly click, click, click, click, click. Then, there were the somewhat difficult bosses. Once you had a healer in your group, the game became too easy. When a party member was about to die just click, click, click, on one party member until their health is up. The fun of this game is quite high. I loved just playing for hours straight. While this game may just be a Diablo clone (and what is wrong with Diablo?), it is still super addictive, just like Diablo was two years ago. I didn’t really stop playing for over a week or two ever and when I missed that much, I had played at least five hours. Overall, I had a great time with this game.

Story (5/10)- If I had to use one word to describe Dungeon Siege’s story, it would average. That is why I gave it a five. It is average and that is what five is. You start out as a young farm boy (or girl) and the Krug, the main enemy, kills your good friend. He tells you to go and find a certain man in the next town. You fight Krug on the way there and talk to the guy. That is where you get other party members. After that you just basically get quests from people that join your party and small parties that tell you things like, go around and open this gate. You might get nothing from it, but it is a “main” quest, which must be completed to move forward. The story is just average with nothing that grabbed me and kept me playing. It was the fun factor that did that. It should have been the story.

Graphics (7/10)- The graphics in this game are very basic 3D. The game can even play with a 2D graphics engine. It didn’t really card for the graphic though. They were nice enough that in the mature version of this game (I will explain this later), there is gore exploding when you kill the enemies. I liked the mature version better than the teen version for this very reason. I think that Gas Powered Games could have made the graphic better, but wanted to make the game accessible to anybody who had a computer, which it can almost do.

Sound (8/10)- I liked the sound in this game. I really, really did. Aside from the click, click, click, there was a very good background of music. I forgot the composer/conductor of the band that mad this music, but it is excellent. When nothing is happening, there is silence, up until a high point in which it was booming. It was really great and I wish it were good in all games.

Playtime (7/10)- I think I played this game between forty and fifty hours. It was a nice time for a relatively good RPG. I am tired of the ten hour RPGs, and this was a nice change from that. I think that it was a good time to play a RPG.

Replayability (3/10)- After spending so many hours playing this game, I don’t think that I would want to play it again. It is the type of game that I will play again in ten years just to see how much farther games have come. It had a good length, but not quite enough to play for fifty hours again.

Final Thought- Overall, this is a pretty good game. It has its fine points and it bad points. I don’t know why they made a gory version rated mature and a non-gory version that was rated teen though there was a code to make it gorier than the mature version. I didn’t get it. For Gas Powered Games’ first good game, this is a good way to start and keep up a tradition of good games.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/08/03, Updated 08/22/03