Dungeon Siege II

"If you are looking for something original..."

Then you are out of luck. Dungeon Siege 2 continues the recent trend I've noticed of games just being carbon copies of already existing games. Not to say this game is terrible, but don't expect it to really blow your mind either. There are very minor spoilers in this review, just a warning for those who care about that.

Like all current games, the graphics are fine. Seriously, is it possible in this day and age to have bad graphics? I don't believe it is. The music is fine, and I'm sure this will surprise most people, the voice acting is terrible. Every NPC you talk to has a voice. There is a button which turns off voices. I recommend using it immediately.

Now the actual gameplay. Controlling your party of do-gooders isn't hard. Hold right click to auto attack, h and m are mapped to healing and mana potions respectively, hit z to pick up loot (rather nice to not have to manually click loot), and 1-6 are mapped to your powers of your party. In addition, you can auto pause at any time in case the piles of monsters gets a bit much and you need to re-evaluate your course of action, and there are many piles of monsters. A side comment on that - I'm a bit frustrated in these types of games where every battle is you vs the swarms. Personally I'm more interested by battles with single foes which actually require more interaction at an individual level beyond holding right click and occasionally using potions as you need them. You don't even have to manually heal your party, drop your heal spells into the auto cast slot and you are good to go. Thankfully that aspect of the AI is pretty good - as long as your healing types have the mana, they will heal your party in a timely fashion, and you basically only die due to lack of healing if the healer dies or you run out of potions, which is rare beyond the first act.

One massive downside to the gameplay is how uninvolved it is. Assuming you have an intelligently picked party (you recruit characters as you go, with the max for your party being 4 in normal difficulty, 5 in veteran, and 6 in elite), use mana efficient spells, and keep up on decent equipment, your job as the player is to hold the right mouse button, shift the mouse around to the next target, and repeat until the entire swarm is dead. Wait 3 seconds for your party to get healed up if necessary, and move on to the next swarm. The only break to this is the bosses, which do require a bit of attention (i.e. the first major boss is a hydra who has 3 heads, one of them complete heals the other heads but not itself, guess which you should kill first), and this trend does continue for most bosses. They are distinctive and generally require a small shift in your tactics to overcome the abilities they have. Besides these few instances of actually having to pay attention, you are mostly a 1 button pony in this game.

The actual difficulty in the game has more to do with party assembly and how you build your characters. The customization of characters in the game is rather good - the melee type character can be either a dual wielder, a sword and shield type, or a 2h weapon user. Nature mages can be devoted to being healer/stat buff bots, summoners, or respectable nukers. Your ranged type character can do large sum single target damage, or be a bit more useful to swarms with throwing weapons (props to GPG for making throwing weapons actually good considering throwing weapons are never good in any other game). Skill selection has a fair bit to do with how your character will develop. Every level, you get a skill point much like in Diablo 2. On occasion, quests will grant skill points as well. Most skills are used to increase the efficacy of the powers in that particular tree at some level, so putting in points, besides providing the benefit of that particular skill, also make your powers stronger. However, skills have diminishing returns the higher their rank is, which to me is a horrible idea. They cap at 20, but its almost never worth going higher than 10-12 because many high level items add +1 or more to all skills, and the benefit being greatly diminished at higher ranks. For a rip off the Diablo 2 system, they could've at least done it better.

Powers range from being horrible to being too good to the point of necessity. Take Provoke for example. That single power will completely dictate how difficult your game will be. It taunts all monsters in a certain radius to attack the provoker, adding a bit of control over the swarm. You can only use provoke with a shield, which shields tend to add a lot of armor, and you can block with them, and typically the provoker has exceptional health and defensive abilities, so typically that character is mostly unkillable. I remember one time my first play through, my provoker was the only character who lived through the first boss, eventually having to solo him. It took a while, but he really couldn't die. Of course you can opt to not use a provoker, have your mages and ranged attacker die all the time, have to use tons more potions, and likely have to get your corpses more often. So I highly recommend using it to anyone who wants to avoid frustration. The other useful powers are mostly just area effect damage spells which even more so tilt the balance in your favor.

The save system is yet another annoyance. I can see it was done that way to add some difficulty. When you save, it says you save, but when you quit and come back, you come back in the nearest town to where you were. There is no load feature except to continue from the title screen, and when you die, your corpse sits where you die with 25% of your funds on it. You can have the necromancer in town summon your corpses, but he takes 25% of your money, and if you quit then continue to try to get around that, you come back with your corpses, and the funds missing regardless. Either way, if you do manage to die I highly recommend always using the necromancer because gold doesn't matter.

A side rant here - why can't any game make money useful? The only use for cash in this game is enchanting, which is mostly not worth it except making rings with 8 15% magic find trinkets in them, and you can't do that reliably until really late in normal mode or in higher difficulties. There is seldom anything worth buying in stores, and monsters drop *tons* of loot. Besides that, typically set items and uniques are always better than rares and uncommons of a similar level range, and sets/uniques drop with enough frequency you won't being using rares or uncommons for long, especially after the first act. Besides that, most quests give random set and unique items as rewards.

Of course, one problem with the set/unique drop system is typically monsters drop items up to around their level, and far below it. Very often at higher levels you'll see a purple or yellow item which is a really low level item, which you'll just sell for an inconsequential amount of gold. There aren't that many sets and uniques to be honest, so I see no reason for those types of items to typically be around the monsters and your level range. As far as those items as quest rewards, since most of them are random, this problem exists in that aspect as well so I recommend saving, talk to the quest giver, check out the item, if its horrible, quit and continue, walk back, repeat until you get something decent. There are alternatively player made mods which make it so uniques/sets drop closer to your level range all the time, and there is even one which the only items you get are sets and unique items. A friend of mine downloaded it and used it and got every high level set and most high level uniques within 90 minutes.

Lastly, the quest system. Talk to people with yellow exclamation points to get quests. Complete the objective, get loot. Quest objectives are 90% of the time just killing stuff, the other 10% the occasional puzzle - puzzles aren't too bad in this game either. I found some puzzles to be fairly ingenious, and found it a shame that wasn't applied to other aspects of the game. The one annoyance is secondary quests are given based on who is in your party, so if you never switch party members you can only do the same quests. I guess this was done to try to add some reason to replay the game if only to do new quests, but the only quests worth doing when replaying the game are ones with skill points as awards considering the item awards are randomized, meaning you have about as good a chance of getting uniques/set items from mindless slaughter as you do from the quest.

There is also a multiplayer option, which I can't see any reason to do besides making the game even easier since each player would control their own character which is that much better than the standard auto attack of the single player game. At least in Diablo 2 multiplayer made monsters notably harder. Even higher difficulty levels don't make the monsters harder as much as give them the damage/health to compensate for the massive power gains your characters get over the course of the game. The only reason to play the higher difficulty levels is to get more party slots and better loot, so don't expect the game to actually be hard at higher levels. Personally I played through it 2 times to get to elite difficulty, played elite for an hour, and haven't played it for 2 weeks.

You may wonder if I have anything positive to say about the game. Personally, I rather enjoy these types of games, building up characters to be freaks, getting good/rare pieces of equipment. There is a certain enjoyable quality to mindless monster bashing. You don't have to waste your time reading dialogue or trying to keep up on the "storyline", as its all really thin and mostly not worth your time, so you can continue with the action pretty quickly. The minimal involvement allows the player to jump in and out of the game mostly at their leisure, and thankfully despite the horrid save system teleporters (which are just like Waypoints in Diablo 2) allow you to hit one, save, quit and come back close to where you were before, with a fully respawned world of course.

I do think considering whats out there, this game is ok. Readers may wonder why I mentioned Diablo 2 a few times, and that is simply because that is the best comparison this game has. Many things obviously make it want to be Diablo 2, but it still lacks the uniqueness of that game. It doesn't aspire to be better than Diablo 2, just around as good, and it definitely delivers the bare minimum.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/05