Dungeons & Dragons Daggerdale Reviews

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Written by Brother None on June 6th, 2011

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This is to say nothing of a slightly broken quest we encountered. The quest requires you to kill 10 of a specific enemy, but it turned out there weren't ten in existence so, after the fifth kill, the mission marker had nothing to point to, and just continued to point where the fifth had been. This left me running around hoping they'd spawn (which they would, you often see groups of enemies spawning directly in front of you) and hoping the mission marker would highlight them when they spawned, as they didn't count otherwise. Frustrating.

Even the fighting itself is awkward. Enemies are almost always simply time consuming to defeat rather than difficult. Often they don't really damage you, but you're stuck hitting them over and over because they've got too much health. Wizards also have their own set of combat issues, with a sparsity of quarterstaffs in the game's opening leaving you feeling impotent in a melee situation.

The game does have a saving grace that rescues it from the depths of gaming forgetfulness: co-op. Yes, you can have three friends join you in your dungeon crawl, so now the four of you can fight over the loot that you just fought for.

Daggerdale allows two types of co-op: online and local. Local co-op allows two players to play on the same screen, but none of the split-screen goodness that other games allow. Here you play on the same screen which prevents one player from running ahead and claiming all the kills and loot. This works well for keeping the group together. However, it totally negates the need for any character's quick speed, making your singleplayer character not always the best choice for co-op.

There are bad games and then there are terrible games; Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale rests firmly with the latter. It's cheap, it's not fun to play and most important of all, it's broken beyond belief. Sure, a patch can fix it, but it's almost insulting that the developers would release it like this in the first place. Daggerdale is not only a terrible game, but a terrible raping of a license that's sure to piss off long time fans.

It's been a while since I've played a title with as many game-breaking bugs as Daggerdale. Take this particular quest for example, found quite early on in the game; a distraught dwarf asked me to take out a wave of nasty undead foes in a mine, and return to him for a reward when 10 had been killed. I set off to follow the map marker and find the first five baddies and slay them, Gimli style. I then wait for the map marker to update and show me the next location for the rest of my targets. They never appeared. I ran around for 45 minutes searching for the remaining foes to realise that the game had failed to spawn them and that a full restart was needed.

Too Few Classes and Spiked Difficulty - While it can be argued that brevity should be expected from a downloadable title, the shortness of the single player campaign is disappointing. The campaign only took me five hours to beat, and there was also an alarming lack of variety when it came to the classes. With only four character types to choose from, I found myself wanting more from this fantasy setting. Also, the game spikes up the difficulty level about halfway through the story which made the entire gameplay experience frustrating. I found myself getting more than upset on a number of occasions because of beefed up enemies.

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