Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale (PC) Review
Man, Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale is a mixed bag. I was expecting exactly what I got with this game. A hack-n-slash with a little bit of DnD thrown into the mix in the similar vain of Champions of Norath and Baulder's Gate: Dark Alliance for the PS2. DnD:Daggerdale is a pretty bare bones example of what a company can do with the rules of the popular table top.
For $15 this game has some decent gameplay. There are no customization options for the appearance of your characters features, however the gear that your character gets allows you to be unique from others. There are four classes that you can choose from; Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Mage. Each class is varied from each other enough to where playing each class is somewhat different.
You can level each character to 10, which gives them plenty of skill points and stat points to customize your character with. However, you can pretty much come close to maxing out most skills. The gear options are very expansive, borrowing much from the DnD universe. There are some pieces of epic gear that you can get and I noticed that they can have varying stats on them such as +33-36% reduced chance of getting knocked back.
The PC version seems fairly stable. The graphics are decent and a lot of options can be changed through manually changing the .ini files such as specific resolutions. The one major issue that I did run into was with the textures of quite a few items. They were seemingly completely missing. I was running around for a good portion of the game it seemed with a purple and white model of my character. It wasn't game breaking but definitely annoying not being able to see my awesome gear.
The best thing about this game is by far the co-op play. Three other players and yourself can join a game through Gamespy (eh) and can leave at any time without causing interruption to the other players. The lobbies are setup in a very simple manner and you can't see which classes the other players are until you enter the game itself. You can use mics to communicate with the other players but I wasn't able to figure out how to text chat with them. In the little time that I did play the multiplayer I didn't experience much lag or very many bugs.
The music and sound effects are pretty much bargin bin, but there are some decent music. I could have sworn they sampled music from Terminator 2 in the mines, but besides that the grunts and stuff was pretty simple. The narrative cutscenes between chapters was pretty decent and the artwork was nice, but not having voice throughout the game was disappointing to say the least. I'd be happy to do some voice overs for you!
While the game can be fun at short spurts, it can definitely get tiresome if you aren't a fan of loot grinds and simple quests. I would say that for the $15 price tag, you can have a pretty decent time with the game. If you are looking for that table top, deep role-playing experience you might want to move along.
- A quick edit for this post: After about 20 hours of gameplay my character file became corrupt and I am unable to load up the game with him. I would be wary of buying this game if you aren't cool with losing your work haha.
