Dungeon Siege III
Dungeon Siege III is a game in which you siege dungeons. I really wish I could give you more than that, but the game is relatively shallow. I'll give it credit in that it attempts to have rich lore (a la Warcraft series, Mass Effect series and Dragon Age series) but it's a half-assed attempt at best. The story flows somewhere along the lines of this: You are one of the sole surviving members of something called The Legion. I'm not sure if it's a race, but I suspect it may be considering they use the term "Legion blood" a lot. The Legion was at one point the ruling body of the kingdom of Ehb however a few decades before the game's setting, some bitch up and decides the Legion is responsible for the death of her father, the king. I'll note that it's left ambiguous whether this is true when you learn of it, so there's a little bit of narrative depth for you. So, with the Legion now accused of murdering the king, the king's daughter rallies the people of Ehb against them and almost totally annihilate them.
This is where you come in; about 30 years later you (and 'you' is a very dynamic term considering how many starting characters there are) are in a Legion family mansion and it gets attacked. It's time to take up your destiny and restore the Legion to its former glory. The mansion goes up in flames and you, with a few others, escape to an old Legion chapter house which is located conveniently close to a bunch of useful places. From here, you start your journey under the guidance of some old guy who apparently knows a bunch of shit. It's all really watery to be honest, the objective of the game aside from "restore Legion" isn't really very clear.
Gameplay is not the worst thing I've ever played (Kane and Lynch) but at times it can be slightly frustrating. I find the controls to be my biggest issue, holding down right click in the direction you want your character to move doesn't really lend itself to agility and finesse in battle. I'd describe it more as trying to play Scrabble with a claw from the skill-tester machine. One thing I did find handy is that, while in my character's floating flame avatar form, the dodge-roll ability becomes a short-range teleport ability which comes in handy for avoiding slow moving projectiles. On the whole, combat for me came down to three actions: cast area-of-effect spell -> summon Jackal -> mash left-mouse in general vicinity of things you don't like. It's not a bad combat system, per se, but it gets old very quickly.
The topic of combat brings me to the companions or "party" however I hardly consider 1 companion active at a time a "party." With the character I chose, my first companion was a swordsman named Lucas. Let me be as clear as possible on this: Lucas is a wanker. He never shuts up, spewing one liners at everything he notices. It's like as spiders are coming down from the ceiling he will quip "Those are spiders!" Yeah, I know Lucas, they're eating my face.
Later you acquire another companion named Katarina who, like every damn female in this game, has the most unbelievable rack. Look, I understand that you want your protagonists to be attractive but there's no way in hell these women are fighting hordes of undead with 32DD tits in a push-up bra. It almost hurts me to complain about boobs, but I have to tell it like it is.
Everybody knows I'm a sucker for a boss fight, but this game really let me down in that respect. Bosses tend to be a very shallow experience. Every fight turns into "kite boss if he is attacking you, shoot him if he isn't." It's not just me being cheap, either, as every boss will absolutely wreck your shit if you don't constantly dodge their attacks. I guess it's lucky that they pretty much ask written permission to attack you with how obvious their animations are. I ended up equipping Lucas with a bunch of HP and Armour gear, with skills to keep enemies away from me so I could just rain down hellfire from afar while he took all the punishment. It's effective and I also liked watching him get reamed.
I think the most interesting thing a boss did to me was teleport to the other side of the room when I was doing too much damage to it. Other than that it was just standard tank'n'spank fare, or bosses who make you fight a wave of minions after you do x% of his HP in damage.
In the atmosphere department, Dungeon Siege III has very nice graphics, however I can't help but feel they're a little wasted because almost all you do is crawl through dungeons, so quite a bit of the scenery is standard dungeon scenery. Cobblestone walls, dripping water, dirt and spiders. There was a section that was very visually impressive called The Mournweald however upon reaching the end of it, you're teleported out and never allowed to return. Well fuck.
The sound department for Dungeon Siege III is nothing impressive. I will note that the voice acting was very hit and miss. The voice actors for Lucas and Katarina were good but unfortunately the voice actors for Anjali and... well everyone else was absolutely pathetic. Also the Jackal makes the same noise as that thing Obi Wan rides in Star Wars Episode II. Absolutely 100% identical.
From a mechanics perspective, the game brings nothing new to the table. The skill system is solid in implementation, however quite a few of the skills leave something to be desired. I think a big part of this is that the game never actually explains to you what each stat does, so you may be equipping yourself to do something you can't do. I would very much have appreciated some kind of codex similar to Mass Effect that stored information about the various nuances of the game.
Equipment is also standard RPG fare with your equipment boosting various statistics, different weapons, etc. I would like to have seen a scaling loot system so I wasn't dropping gloves worth 5 gold at a point in the game where all my gear was worth 10,000+ gold.
All in all, Dungeon Siege III is a very 'meh' game. It's not awful by any means, but it fails to impress in any significant capacity. If you're a fan of this style of game it's worth a play through, otherwise you're probably better off playing one of the more solid games from this genre (Torchlight, Diablo, etc.)
6.5 out of 10 potential fucks given.
No comments:
Post a Comment