Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on May 27th, 2011

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At the risk of repeating myself, the game is just broken. And in this age of "eh, we'll fix that with a first-week patch," it's particularly sad to see what feels like so little effort put into living up to what can even objectively be described as a legendary property. There are aspects about Daggerdale that work, but chief among them? The controls are tight, the control scheme itself cleverly makes special abilities accessible by holding down a single shoulder button, and the hack-and-slash action is enjoyable at first. But are those alone reasons to play Daggerdale? No.

Given that Bedlam intends to make this the first installment of a planned trilogy, here's hoping it plans its next rolls of the 20-sided die a little more carefully.

Daggerdale unfortunately has a number of rather glaring and frustrating graphical bugs: the game's enemies sometimes remain standing (but become non-targetable) after they've been killed meaning you'll waste time attacking dead statues. Conversely, the game highlights both your allies and breakable barrels in the same red as your enemies, meaning that in the thick of darkened-dungeon combat you'll waste time smashing barrels instead of goblin faces (not to mention the havoc this plays with auto-targeting). Interface-prompts to speak to NPC's remain floating in the air even after NPC's have walked off, or hang around above NPC's that actually can't be interacted with at all. There's also some tearing issues on-screen, with my 42) 1080p HD LCD ripping every so often as the game's rendering engine struggled to catch up.

All in all, if you're after a fun couple of evenings with some mates on the couch together, you'd be hard-pressed to go past Daggerdale. Get three friends to toss in five dollars each, and even the 1200 MS points is hardly an issue. But if you're after the next Neverwinter Nights instead, then this really isn't the game for you.

Certainly the repetitive and mindless combat isn't enough to keep your interest, despite some fairly visceral action. The bland and generic missions, all fetch quests and kill X monsters, are even less inspired.

We would compare this to older games like Dark Alliance and simply suggest you go back to one of those if you want a no nonsense co-op dungeon crawler. But frankly you could all the way back to Gauntlet and still have a far more entertaining experience than this.

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale has a lot of glitches, very little plot, almost no enemy variety and a sloppy interface that sometimes makes playing the game a chore. The first few hours almost immediately feel tedious, but the game improves from there. Unfortunately, it never really does anything especially memorable. Even with a cooperative multi-player mode and multiple classes, there's not much reason to continue playing once you've completed the brief main quest. Someday the title will likely be available at a discounted price and worth a purchase for that reason. In the meantime, though, it's a difficult game to recommend to anyone but the diehard dungeon crawler fan.

If you are looking for a deep, thrilling story, you'll be disappointed, but you're looking for some great dungeon crawling with tons of loot with some friends, then this is your game. Similar games like Torchlight may be more polished and have deeper character, item, and skill upgrade systems, but they don't have online co-op like Daggerdale does. That alone really makes this game worth it, and makes it a lot of fun.

There are several nice touches for co-op - for instance as a cleric I was able to heal my partners and gain experience for doing such a task. The game almost forces players to specialize in a role as each enemy has specific weaknesses which are denoted by icons over their head. So while I might be able to damage the goblins well over here with my axe, my co-op partner who is playing a ranged character does more damage to the skeletons that are mixed into the fray. This provides a bit of back and forth during battle that can be very satisfying.

The journey is a fairly meaty affair, especially if you decide to take on all the side quests it can easily be a 10 hour romp, which is quite a bit of value in a $15 game. If you can look past some of the technical issues, Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale there is a fun co-op experience to be had. While we may have set unfair expectations for the game to live up to its pedigree, what is there stands on its own.

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