Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

Dungeons and Dragons was a different kind of game when it was created.  Instead of playing with a board and dice, you played by creating characters and using your imagination to control the action as the “Dungeon Master” described the scene.  The most difficult part of playing D&D was getting a group of friends together who wanted to play, had characters created, and someone to direct the game.

Those who have followed computer gaming for a long time, the words “Gold Box” give a shiver up and down the spine.  These games were a part of the Dungeons & Dragons series that brought the role-playing experience to the PC.  It was considered a golden age of the RPG.  Since then some games have flourished with the D&D license, while others have fallen flat.  Atari has attempted to bring the most accurate reproduction of D&D on the PSP with Dungeons and Dragons Tactics.

At first the graphics of D&D Tactics look good.  The hand-drawn character portraits are drawn with style that matches other fantasy artwork.  The different races and classes are represented.  Still, the number of portraits is rather limited since it feels like only one portrait fits with the characters you create.

The graphics in the game while questing look bad, even for a PSP game.  The characters don’t have much detail because of plain and blurry textures.  Even facial features are missing.  While this wouldn’t be so bad if the animations were varied to represent the different actions, the animations are the same for different actions.  Opening a chest looks much like the character is using his or her weapon as a shovel and taking a scoop of dirt.

The game does have some nice particle effects.  Magic attacks flurry with sparkles and fire attacks burn with an explosion that knocks the character back.  There are sometimes too many flourishes for the game, as they happen at times when they really don’t seem to be appropriate.

Musically, the game has a medieval feel to it.  While going into dungeons the music takes a more ominous tone, while finishing a battle gives an upbeat tone.  The music isn’t very original, but it does its job without becoming distracting.

Sound effects match the on-screen display.  Menu options click as each menu is selected.  Explosions boom after fire attacks.  Magic flourishes sparkle.  There isn’t anything surprising, but nothing sounds out of place either.

There isn’t much to controlling the characters in D&D Tactics.  You use the D-pad for moving the cursor or menu option, hit X to select, or Circle to cancel.  The problem isn’t in the controls, it’s in the menu.  The menu has several options for you to choose from, with sub-options after sub-options.  Maneuvering through the options to try to find the option you are looking for can be difficult.  The game is rather intuitive most of the time, but there are times when you have difficulty finding the right option if you choose to do something other than what the game expects.

The name of the game is D&D Tactics, and the main word in that title is Tactics.  The main portion of the game is combat.  If you enjoy combat in D&D, you will largely enjoy the game.  Tactics puts your party out on the battlefield, whether it’s a farm field or a dungeon.

When you first start playing D&D Tactics, you create a party.  You can either choose characters already created, or you can create your own characters.  You choose six characters to form your party, but you don’t start out in the game with a party of six characters.  Instead you start with yourself and a second member and gain members as the game progresses.

At first when you start the game, there doesn’t feel like there is much point to the story.  You go into one battle and fight, buy items at the shop if you want, and then go on and fight another battle.  It takes a while to actually get into any kind of story at all.  The fact that you don’t really do much between battles when first starting the game doesn’t help the pace of the game.

While in a quest, you follow the rules of D&D.  While in combat you get a movement action and then you can perform another action, or you can do a combat action and then some other action.  The actions follow D&D rules implicitly.  The actions you have available are displayed within the menu.  When you decide to move, the squares you can move to show up on the screen.  When attacking, you can select which enemy to attack.  While you aren’t in combat you can move your party in any order, but during combat the game takes care of initiative.

One of the fun parts of D&D was rolling the dice and seeing what happened with the rolls, especially when you rolled a 20 or a 1.  In D&D Tactics, you get to see the results, but you don’t have any idea of how they came about, because you don’t get to see the dice roll.  It wouldn’t need to be distracting, but getting some explanation of the rolls would be appreciated, especially for those new to the game.

When not in battle, you can go to the town and purchase new equipment.  Unfortunately you will be hard pressed for gold at times because of the fact that once you finish combat you can’t continue to get the loot in the chests on the level.  This makes combat frustrating when you need to separate your forces to get the loot in the chests.

The game has online multiplayer, but instead of playing cooperatively, all but one of the modes are competitive.  They all are different, but only slightly.  In the cooperative game you try to go through several levels of a dungeon together and survive until the end.  In Last Man Standing, you fight against the other party and the team that survives until the end wins.  In Dragon Kill both sides try to slay the dragon.  The team with the fatal blow to the dragon wins.  In Gladiator each team does combat in an arena against several monsters and the team that defeats the most monsters wins.  Also, because of how long it can take to take turns because it is turn based, matches can last a while. Dungeons and Dragons Tactics does a good job of trying to recreate those sessions where you get together with several buddies and eat junk food while rolling dice.  Unfortunately, some of the rules are adhered to too well, and sometimes the game doesn’t allow you to do the things you can do in a regular game of D&D.  While the game was touted as the first game using the D&D 3.5 ruleset, it is now obsolete as Wizards of the Coast has announced the 4.0 ruleset.  Atari has a good engine on their hands, and with some tweaking a little more polish, this could be a fun game.  Unless you live for D&D combat, you’ll likely be disappointed.

Gaming Trend Score

68

1. Graphics: 62
2. Audio: 70
3. Controls: 72
4. Gameplay: 66
5. Value/Replay: 74
6. OVERALL:68