In recent years, Dungeons & Dragons hasn't received a lot of gaming support.
A few Enhanced Editions of classic titles, Baldur's Gate III in (very) Early Access, new modules for the MMO Neverwinter and a few minor titles on mobile devices.
Overall, therefore, a certain lack of new titles compared to other times.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance It was immediately a breath of fresh air, although the initial announcement was accompanied by a weird trailer with bizarre shots that sparked almost this general reaction:
In short, not the best way to create interest in your game, but then the situation has fortunately improved. First and foremost, Dark Alliance is just a name that pays homage to the two classics of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, but its gameplay is very different. At the beginning the study Tuque Games he was really making a game with an isometric view that was very reminiscent of the old Dark Alliance, but then the idea changed and we moved on to a different title that pays homage to the past.
So… what is it Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance? Let's try to understand this by outlining the character sheet of this game.
Force
Dark Alliance promises a fun 1-4 player game in which we make our way through various levels that allow us to explore the vast lands of the Valley of the Cold Wind and face a wide range of enemies.
In a videogame landscape more and more full of 1-4 player cooperative shooters, Dark Alliance immediately finds two points that raise its strength characteristic:
- Game style
- Enemy classification
Dark Alliance is not a shooter and relies much of its gameplay on the hand to hand combat. This is already a good starting point that distinguishes it from many other games currently present, but a factor that distances it even more is thewide choice of moves.
This is because Dark Alliance has a very simple combat system to understand at a basic level, since it is based on combinations of light attacks, heavy attacks, dodges, parries and counterattacks. A bit like a fighting game, though, the gameplay expands and evolves learning those combinations of attacks and dodges that allow you to unleash many particular techniques.
At first, it may be easy for you to defeat enemies with simple sequences of light and heavy attacks, but by raising the difficulty you will learn the value of all those techniques, especially if you also count the particular team attacks resulting from the cooperation between players.
As for the enemies, we are not faced with yet another Left 4 Dead clone, but rather a game that tries to reproduce the classic D&D experience. The levels of Dark Alliance take players on a fairly linear path, but which can sometimes diversify if you want to kill secondary mini-bosses, solve puzzles to unlock additional attribute points and find every resource between gold and crystals.
During this journey you will find yourself in those that you will immediately recognize as the “Rooms” of a dungeon, that is, points where enemies of various kinds will wait for you or arrive. Between goblin, slander, verbeeg, cultisti, gnoll and more, the diversification of the enemies is not lacking, also because it is immediately possible to notice with pleasure that the various factions are not reskin of fixed categories. Each faction fights differently and yet the goblin archer has a different pattern of behavior from the duergar crossbowman.
I was very pleased to see this diversification because I was afraid of finding myself in front of so many enemies that seem different, but that in reality only differ in their 3D model.
A trait common to all enemies, however, is one's own special version (or champion), since it is the enemy in the "most badass" format thanks to the addition of an offensive element such as poison or the like.
Finally, there is also a unique mechanic for the short rest, which can be used to reload life and consumables, or skipped to get a bonus to potential loot quality.
Dark Alliance therefore has a Strength value of 16.
Dexterity
Dark Alliance has a little less Dexterity than its own Strength and I am referring to the graphics and fluidity of certain animations.
The game does not have excellent graphics, on the contrary, it has a quite dated graphic sector.
The videos that introduce and conclude the various narrative arcs are really very beautiful, the landscapes are very evocative and the enemies are not bad at all, but a close analysis of the protagonists immediately shows models that are not very rich in detail.
Weapons and armor, on the other hand, they have ups and downs. There are some really cool legendary armor to look at, while everything else ranges from "very appreciable" to "but did you take a dented piece of iron off the ground to dress yourself up?".
The combat animations are very fluid in the concatenation of the attacks and the same can be said of the enemies, but there are some defects as soon as we go to observe the animations outside the combat. Cloaks and other fluttering objects don't always move well and the animations dedicated to character rotation are a bit woody. The gameplay does not suffer from this, moreover the sensitivity and the distance of the camera can be customized to change the experience a lot, not to mention that it is much more important to have good animations in the fight, but on balance some are not exactly great.
Dark Alliance has a Dexterity value of 15.
Constitution
The Constitution of this game stands in its longevity. Dark Alliance offers various degrees of difficulty that can raise the challenge a lot and instigate the deep desire to face the terrible powers of this game in their worst form. However, in a game of this type there is a factor of predictability.
There are many PvP or PvE games that rely on playing many games in the same maps and / or against the same enemies, but often this factor is mitigated due to the fact that in a PvE game, enemies can appear in different places and do not always arrive. same. Maybe the first time you met a horde, while the next time a very angry mini-boss also showed up suddenly changes the flow of the game.
In a PvP game, on the other hand, players can always behave in different ways and maybe even put in the middle of equipment available on the map that does not always appear in the same points. All these things can greatly mitigate the repetitiveness of a game and allow players to entertain themselves for many hours because each game, although it has the same foundation, can always offer a different experience. Dark Alliance, unfortunately, takes a false step on this front.
If I repeat the same Dark Alliance level two or three times, that goblin archer in the far right will always be there. Undoubtedly we could put the speedrunner speech in the middle because there will be those who will take on the challenge of killing each enemy and completing the levels in the shortest possible time, but we are talking about a specific category of players. Most of the public, after playing the same level a few times and perhaps reaching the maximum difficulty level, will have little reason to continue spending hours on this game.
As a result, Dark Alliance gains a Constitution value of 12.
Intelligence
Let's examine theArtificial intelligence by Dark Alliance.
I must say I found it quite fluctuating.
In cramped rooms, enemies can press players and turn out to be quite aggressive, especially when it comes to duergar spellcasters, ice trolls, or any type of gnoll. However, the problem arises we just create some distance between us and the enemies. Regardless of the degree of difficulty, even reaching the highest ones, the enemies prove to be very little oppressive as soon as we manage to get away from them and unfortunately this is mainly noticeable in the frost giants, who will walk loooong slowly towards us, sometimes even stopping to beat a fist on the chest. Every now and then they will launch into a ferocious charge, but even that will have to wait to be within a certain distance of us.
I troll and wraith, on the contrary, they are the ones that have seemed to me studied better than many others, since they can be very intrusive and it is a pity that the artificial intelligence of the other enemies is not on the same level.
In the trailers and in a thousand promotional images you have undoubtedly seen a beholder and he is the enemy who in my opinion wins the first place. I found it really well studied in the behavioral model and in the study of the arena in which we have to face it. Quite the opposite for the frost giant dubbed by the dear Joe Manganiello, as it is extremely easy to outwit and to keep at a safe distance when making its most powerful attacks.
Overall, Dark Alliance has an Intelligence value of 11.
Wisdom
To overcome a repetition that will hardly treat players for a very long time, will Dark Alliance have wisely devised good post-launch support?
Indeed yes, we just have to see how it will evolve.
Tuque Games has already shown plans designed to support Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance over the course of this summer and fall. The first two free add-ons they will consist of new levels and an additional degree of difficulty that will lead players to find new and difficult challenges. Later, the paid expansion will come out Echoes of the Bloody War, which will not only introduce new levels and enemies, but also a playable character apparently based on the use of magic.
In fact all these details are to be considered separately, do not affect the actual rating of this title because it is necessary to judge what is available now (in fact we will talk about the DLC in due course), but it is still nice to know that the developers intend to expand the game by working on the creation of new content.
Dark Alliance therefore has Wisdom 13.
Carisma
Yes, many reviews actually talk about the story much earlier, but Charisma is the last feature on the character sheet and I don't want to violate the sacred order of features. Dark Alliance is a game that owes a lot of its charisma to the setting it deals with and the characters chosen to exploit it, but does it do it well? Enough.
This game takes the famous Drizzt Do'Urden and his companions by inserting them in a story set after the ending of The Crystal Relic (originally published under the title Le land of ice), the first novel of the Trilogy of the Valley of the Icy Wind who in 1988 introduced us for the first time Drizzt, Catti-Brie, Bruenor, Wulfgar, Regis and other characters who have become legendary over the years. Tuque Games summarizes some of the events of the novel to give an understandable context even to those unfamiliar with the saga and allows us to experience the immediate consequences of that ending.
The story of Dark Alliance is quite simple, the daughter of the most classic of D&D adventures, that is, many villains who want the powerful crystal Crenshinibon and a group of heroes who want to stop them, which is why they leave trying to foil the plans of these villains one by one. Nothing surprising, overall it is a pretext to advance the levels and have fun with the gameplay.
Nonetheless, Dark Alliance fits in quite well with the events of the "Drizzt & Co." and the vast unlockable lore allows you to learn more about the protagonists, the enemies faced, the places explored and various local stories or legends.
More, it is precisely the enemies who have charisma to sell thanks to the numerous dialogues that can be heard when they are not yet aware of our presence. We can understand their ideas about what is happening in the Chill Wind Rift and various other topics. Outstanding is the dialogue in which a goblin claims to have a large collection of toenails of various monsters, including those of Wraith, ghostly beings notoriously legless.
At the same time, however, the interaction between the protagonists does not stand up to comparison with these dialogues and the charisma and vast characterization of these characters are not very well transmitted to us. The dialogues are there and we can always hear them at the beginning of a level and sometimes before and after the individual fights, but they are not that interesting. A real shame, since it clashes with the enjoyment of the dialogues of the enemies and the readable setting information.
Finally, the sound sector is really well integrated into the game. There aren't many tracks, but there was a large study of diegetic music, that is, that music that is not only in the background, but that someone is actually playing within the game world. Between the drums of duergars, the horns of giants and the thunderous voices of verbeegs, Dark Alliance knows how to give us the sounds of the Forgotten Realms.
Condensing all of this, Dark Alliance gains a Charisma value of 14.
End of session speech
So what is the overall thinking on this character called Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance? A game that knows how to be strong and that knows how to distinguish itself from others that compete with similar classes, but which clearly has various edges to be found in a team that is in its second title developed, moreover with very different characteristics from the previous work. A fun title that I don't think will be remembered in the future as a legendary pearl of the past, but which in my opinion is worth playing to have fun with friends and to spend a few hours in a cooperative different from many others present in the today's videogame landscape.
Oh, one last note before saying goodbye: bring the camera a little closer, trust me.
