Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on May 30th, 2011

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The combat involves pressing A until goblins fall over and carelessly drop their purse. Pressing X will throw whichever weapon you have equipped such as throwing knives or hand-axes. At least you have an infinite number of them. Special moves can be used once, with you having to wait for what seems like forever (a few seconds) while they recharge. You'll rely on them so much as your regular attacks do very little damage in comparison. Extra special moves take ages to unlock and upgrading existing ones only has a minimal effect. Later levels will unlock attribute points for you to allow specific character tailoring but it doesn't make the combat any better.

The biggest combat culprit though is the blatant lie that is the '˜lock-on' button. It struggles with standard moves and completely abandons you for the special moves, usually ripping through the thing air behind you, turning you around for a good old-fashioned goblin sword enema.

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale is also riddled with bugs and lazy design choices. There is severe screen tearing throughout the title's brief duration, as well as several display errors when calculating stats. By far the worst, however, is repeated instances of controls becoming completely locked out. During my playthrough I completely lost control of movement several times, was unable to open the menu once, and was even unable to change key bindings a few times: the buttons simply would not respond.

Many basic interface options also reek of lazy design. Players can only accept one quest at a time, despite the presence of several sidequests scattered throughout the game. Once a quest is accepted, it has to be completed before the game is turned off. Although players can save their progress during a quest, keeping any experience and items gathered, any progress in the quest itself will be lost and must be redone. The game's camera angle is limited to two viewpoints and has no vertical control, the map cannot be scrolled, and players must go through multiple prompts every single time they want to sell an item. Even RPGs released fifteen years ago are more user-friendly than this.

It would be trite to end this review with things like '˜Daggerfall? Daggerfail, more like' or '˜Give it a critical miss'. As a fan of both video games and the Dungeons & Dragons franchise I'm too disappointed for glib soundbites. Daggerdale is poorly paced, borderline unfinished and has little respect for a license that's given us nearly four decades of high adventure. It's a dull game in every sense of the word and while it's not offensive, if you have a dungeon-crawling itch to scratch there are far better games to do it with.

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