Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance review

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance tells the story of four heroes who must fight back against the onslaught of creatures and defend against the dark that roams unchecked through Icewind Dale. Throughout their adventure of exploring the frigid world of Icewind Dale, the four heroes will come across threats of all sizes in their quest to restore peace and cleanse the world of the dark.

D&D Dark Alliance is a 3rd person hack n’ slash experience where players, as one of the four available classes; when you start the game; you pick one of the four characters and just go nuts killing everything between you and your objective; which is more often than not a big bad boss. It uses the same formula you’d expect from a game of the genre.

The combat is pretty straightforward with a bit of complexity. You have a weak and strong attack and using the triggers for example, with the sword carrier, Drizzt Do’Urden, you can use different magic skills such as cloaking, summon a temporary shield, or fire purple projectiles. It offers a decent variety of gameplay and fun combat.

As with more recent hack n’ slash games, the game is filled with looting. You’ll be able to pick up and collect additional equipment that can be used to have a stronger character. You’ll also find crystals in a vast variety of rarity from Common to Rare; crystals can themselves be used to be “upgraded” to a higher class. They can also be used to upgrade your gear to make the stronger and more resistant to certain debuffs.

After clearing camps of enemies, you’ll have the choice to save a checkpoint where your basic items and health will be refilled in order to get yourself ready for the next waves of enemies or you can take a chance and increase loot drop until the next camp. It’s a pretty fun risk/reward situation; especially on harder difficulty levels. This brings me to my next point. Before jumping into an act, you can choose a difficulty, but the game is poorly balanced as there’s a steep difference between the first two difficulty levels. The easiest is fine, but the following one feels like going too hard; I managed to get killed within a few hits.

So where do we begin? First off, the combat, the core of the game, is sluggish, clunky, not fully responsive, and ultra repetitive. Despite your character’s various methods of attacks, it’s easy to just mash away weak and strong attacks to create combos; magic doesn’t do that much damage which will have players resort to melee attacks. The other main problem is the targeting system. You can lock on to enemies, but it’s full-on half-assed. It works when and how it wants to. If you kill your target, it won’t auto-lock to the closest enemy. Sometimes you’ll want to lock on to an enemy that’s closest to you, but instead, it’ll lock on to an enemy in front of you… that’s all the way across the area or a random explosive barrel.

The other main problem pertaining to combat is when you get knocked down. There’s seemingly no easy way to get back up quickly and efficiently aside from button mashing; seems random if and when you promptly get back up, but the thing is unlike other games of the genre, enemies can *still* dish out damage when you’re down and if they gang up on you, they absolutely will kill you before you’re able to make it back up… even on the easiest difficulty setting.

Dark Alliance looks bland, generic, and looks all too familiar because it looks like something we’ve seen in other games such as Shadow of Mordor. The environments are boring and lifeless so don’t expect anything spectacular here; could’ve easily been a mid-generation release for the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation of consoles. The soundtrack is exactly what you’d expect; a classical-inspired score brings befitting the Dungeons & Dragons universe. The voiceover work is fine; narration by your character sounds a bit dry, but the actors voicing the monsters sounding a bit more lively.

I’ll be blunt: this is a great game with extremely poor execution. Repetitive environments, mediocre and extremely repetitive combat, sluggish menu interface, and navigation. In short, I’m convinced this game forgo’ed QA before being released and players were given a beta version of a game. A few more months of polishing and tweaking could’ve made this game a gem and must-play of the year. Instead, we get a broken mess, sluggish mess of a game that Xbox players could thankfully try via Gamepass without wasting money. If you look deep enough, there’s a fun game here; it all depends on your tolerance for repetitiveness and sluggish combat.