Dungeon Siege II Review
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The good news about DS2 is that Chris Taylor has taken criticisms about the original title very seriously. He's modified the game in a number of ways, and added some interesting features to this new release. The bad news, at least where I'm concerned, is that it's still not quite enough.
If you've played DS before and enjoyed it, you'll be pleased to know that the basics haven't changed. You still gather a party, whose attack abilities focus on four distinct combat sets: melee, ranged, combat magic, and nature magic. Each is improved with use, and will get a great deal of use, too, since DS is a hack-and-slash title that seldom throws one enemy at you at any time. As in both Diablo I/II and Sacred, they just crawl out of everywhere with no thought to strategy, and attempt to overwhelm you. The game lets you pause via the spacebar and issue orders to one party member, but if you switch to another, you'll quickly find your previous instructions ignored. Fortunately, the combat AI is, well, not dazzling in its brilliance, but decent enough to act intelligently. Usually.
The graphics are 3D and very attractive from a distance which is the only way you really succeed in combat, frankly but some animations, notably the basic movement of your party members, are repetitive and rather silly-looking when viewed up close. Your enemies are very varied in nature and described with vivid imagination in the manual, but in practice simply use the same basic four attack systems you already know. Kill them, and you acquire goodies: money and items, many of the latter possessing bonuses to everything from attack types to resistances. Gain experience, level up.but you know all that, right? Let's move on.
New and Improved
For starters, there's the new skills system. When one of your characters advance a level, they gain a skill point. This can be applied to any of a series of skills represented on a tree-like structure, very similar in concept to Diablo 2 (surprise, surprise). Skills add everything from the ability to shoot arrows farther to larger mana reserves. You can really tailor each character in your party through skills, producing a combat mage who excels in death magic, lightning, or fire, for instance.
There are also some skills that, acquired above certain quantities at various character levels, unlock (powers.) There are a number of these powers available to each class, and some are rather oddly distributed: why would ranged types acquire Silence, the magical ability to prevent enemies from casting spells for a time? On the other hand, many powers are just a delight to use and watch, such as Chain Lightning, Flurry, and Whirling Strike; despite the fact that the concepts were all clearly borrowed from other previously successful RPG titles. You'll find that most party members acquire several powers (and upgrade them to more powerful versions of themselves) during the game, but you can only have one available per party member from the screen interface at a time. After a power is used, it requires lengthy recharging. In the meantime you can't substitute another power that party member already has in reserve to use in the field, so don't even bother thinking that way. I'm ashamed of you.
Enchanting is new, too or rather, it's new to DS2, but came first from the Diablo series, and then to Divine Divinity. In this game, you get a suitable merchant to take an enchantable object (weapons, armor, even spellbooks), and the reagents that will improve it. Unlike the new skill tree and powers, however, this feature isn't particularly well balanced. Enchantable items aren't found until well into the game, by which time you'll already have acquired plenty of randomly distributed combat treasure with far better statistics. As randomized loot improves as your party members level, so you'll discover more powerful reagents only after you've acquired items that were every bit as good. And without having to pay a fee to an enchanter, too.
You'll also be able to teleport back to a main city, using a special spell, anytime during the game. In fact, if you quit the game and reload, you'll find your party has been moved out of the field and into a city, whether you wanted that to happen, or not. Judging from the fact that the latest (1.2) patch doesn't address this, it wasn't evidently a bug, but a feature. That may be, but it's annoying, regardless. If you just have a few minutes to play on several successive occasions, you'll be frustrated by having to retrace your party's steps before you can resume their progress barring the use of teleport stations, which aren't found every five minutes. Fair warning.
The idea of fleshing out party members with their own quests and comments (some of which are randomly displayed once, or related to specific events) is good; look at what Baldur's Gate II made of it, with great writing and excellent voice acting. Unfortunately, the character writing in DS2 is poor, unfocused, and clichéd, while the voice acting is often nearly as bad. Someone at Gas-Powered Games should do an analysis of what made the party NPCs in BG2 or KotoR2 so compelling: the distinctive wit of one, the unexpected depths of a second, the gradual revelation of evil rotting away a third and how these traits were implemented in comments and actions.
The pet situation leaves me a lot more upbeat. In the original DS, you could purchase multiple mules that couldn't fight, but quietly lugged around a lot of inventory. For some players this was great, but others complained about having to reposition the stupid beasts for each battle, and the wait before they'd rejoin the party afterwards. It got redundant long before the game's end, and there was even talk among some gamers of finding programming ways to kill the things and make roasts or stews out of the results.
In DS2, mules can kick. Can they ever; for while the mule does carry a great deal, its kick makes it an effective melee-based member of your party during combat. Nor are mules the only pets you can purchase. There are nine kinds of pets in all, though all aren't available until midway through the third and final (act) of the game. These include scorpion queens, dark naiads, and lap dragons, to name but a few. Each has its form of attack, and can be fed items you acquire to help it gradually grow. (The kind of items you feed them determine one of the stats they are most likely to improve when they reach the next growth stage.) Purchased as babies, they pass through juvenile, adolescent, young adult and mature stages, acquiring additional attributes, upgrades, and stat bonuses. At the juvenile level, each pet type gets a unique power; so that lap dragons, for example, can allow all party members to do greatly increased damage for 20 seconds. (These powers need to recharge after use, too.) And when they finally reach maturity, each pet receives an (emanation,) an extra power that remains permanently in effect. I was particularly fond of the dire wolf's emanation, which reflects 60% of the physical damage your party takes (provided they remain in a 4-meter radius of the beast) back at attackers.
What's Not New, But Should Be
Well, linearity. There are now a lot more missions your party can take on at any given time, but the game still pushes you forward down very narrow pathways to your goals, where just by chance all quests can be gradually solved, usually in a specific order. That sense of go-anywhere, do-anything, which was part of such series as Elder Scrolls, Might and Magic, Ultima, and Wizardry, is completely missing. You can veer off a given path in DS2 but only a very short distance. And you may find a cave if you do so, but again, whatever you accomplish will simply be part of the narrow path on the way to something else.
Puzzles? Don't make me laugh. The few you can find are so braindead as to deserve Monty Pythonesque scorn. Game companies have been pulling back on this aspect of RPG gameplay for years, now, convinced that to get the largest market for their games, they had to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Judging from the abysmal puzzles in games such as KotoR and DS2, these include legally certified halfwits and intergalactic aliens that have yet to learn Terran logic or language systems.
As in the original DS, the gameplay also feels flat after a while. You can acquire fresh spells and more powerful items, and pump up your new powers, but the enemies still rush at you in large quantities, without thought to tactical positioning. The areas may look different, but there's little interaction with them, and the NPCs you find in town still feel like blandly written objects whose sole purpose is to trade, offer directions, or give a quest/reward. There's nothing long-range to strive for, nor any sudden new purpose that opens up a completely different pathway like the sudden career move to Jedi in the original KotoR. And guess what? You get to play the game through three times, at ever increasing levels of difficulty, facing tougher enemies and getting better goodies. I'm afraid that where game design creativity is concerned, this really doesn't cut it.
I've already dealt with the poor writing. Add to that clumsy plotting, a separate matter, with villains who act against their own best interests and plenty of good guys who apparently do stupid things for non-existent reasons as a matter of course. Hack and slash isn't known to focus on such things, but there's no reason it should be done so ineptly.
Conclusions
If you like the Diablo series, the original DS or Sacred, you'll probably love DS2. It really builds on the original title to allow character customization; not to mention the pets, randomized goody drops, endless enemies, and plenty of missions. But if you want to play a game that faces a growing party with distinctive and original challenges, couched in a creative fashion, with good writing and voice acting as well as interestingly devised combat, then look elsewhere.
