Dungeon Siege III

Review from Barry - Friday, 17 June 2011 @ 1:27pm

The previous Dungeon Siege games were heavily party based - usually numbering around eight - and saw you walking the land of Ehb laying down destruction on all who threatened the King - all for the glory of the 10th Legion. Fast forward a hundred few years and the 10th Legion has been all but wiped out by some woman called Jayne Kassinder, who killed the king, made her own religion, and now rules all the land, or something. It doesn’t really matter that much.

If you can dodge a wrench - you can dodge a ball

If you are a fan of the previous games, it might seem like Dungeon Siege 3 has nothing to do with them - your party of eight is now a party of two (unless you are playing online), your fully customisable character is now one of four pre-made heroes and there are guns?!

The similarities between DS3 and its predecessors are there however, they're just buried beneath the surface a little. While you do not get to customise your heroes appearance you do get to customise their spell load - and more importantly how they use them.

Rules I try to live my life by.

In the original Dungeon Siege games the power was yours - if you wanted a big old axe wielding hero, well you used big axes - on the other hand If you wanted a combat mage who could also hold their own with a sword and shield, you worked both skills equally and got proficient in both. There was no limit in what you could outfit your characters in, as I said - the power was yours.

This however is not the case in DS3 and at first I had a lot of trouble with this - who are these people I have to choose from, what do you mean they HAVE to use these weapon types?! Fast forward an hour or so and you realise that the spirit of that previous customization IS there, just under a layer or two of rigid guidelines.

Take the left or the right? Chances are something nasty lies in both directions

When you first level up (and every three or four levels after that) you get to select a new ability from a skill / talent tree, which in turn lets you apply a talent point into how it operates. Say you select a spell that pushes all enemies 10 yards away from you and does X amount of damage. Well by fine tuning how you use the spell, you can make the spell do more damage when it pushes enemies away, or tune it to slow down the enemies that are pushed away for Y amount of seconds. Each ability can be tuned 5 times from either of these two options, allowing for a large degree of customization, in the set limitation of that spell.

None shall pass!!!

The interface nearly needs its own review itself, especially for the PC version. LMB for attack, RMB to move your character - this seems simple enough at the start. Then add in the space bar for block / dodge and the 1,2 and 3 buttons for your spells for your current weapon stance and you start to get a bit more complicated. Then you realise that while holding down space bar you have access to your defensive spells, so you need to push space bar and a number button. Ok now we are getting there, but wait - then the Q button will change your weapon stance, so there is a whole other set of spells and abilities on the 1,2,3 keys now. Confused? Well we are not done yet. While holding down shift each weapon stance has its own special move which can be done with Shift + LMB, but only while you have a full ability sphere. The ability spheres are easy enough to acquire, simply attack enemies, but the defensive spells also use the ability spheres, so use them wisely. Fret not though readers, you DO get the hang of it (or you can just press LMB until everything is dead).

For a game called Dungeon Siege 3 you spend amazingly little time within dungeons and even then most of them are either crypts or caverns - but there is the odd dungeon. That is not to say that the environments are all the same, in the first couple of hours expect to see no less than two separate forests (one haunted), an abandoned mage mansion, a plundered heroes crypt and a swamp. While these levels are fairly linear they are very nicely designed and beautifully textured. Not to be outdone, the musical score is just fantastic - rising crescendos in the heat of battle, subtle sinister music as you descend an old stone staircase to face a boss monster, its touches like this that really make the game shine - in your ears.

A subtle nod to the packmules from previous games

Forget hailing to the king baby, its time to hail to the return of local co-op - or couch co-op as they love to call it now - and it is as easy as plugging in a controller and pressing the start button. Your best bet is going to be with one of those fancy Xbox 360 controllers for Windows, however I am sure other controllers will also work. DS3 also supports 4 player online co-op and this is something I am very keen to try out, but I haven't been able to yet. While couch co-op has been available in recent 3rd person action adventures like Fable 3, there is no need to marry or form a partnership or anything stupid like that in DS3. This is because loot is mainly character specific, so there is no need to madly pick up everything as soon as it drops as players have a shared inventory.

A native tribe called the First people... to die!

If you are all out of friends, fear not, the AI in DS3 is fantastic - they switch stances depending on enemy groupings, they will revive you when you die and they also run around picking up the dropped gold for you. Another new feature in DS3 is character influence - much like previous Obsidian developed games, at various points throughout the story you have the option of taking different conversation routes and providing you take the right one, you will gain influence with the current party character. Each influence gain yields various perks to your character along the lines of +2 to attack and what not - apparently if you gain enough influence something magical happens.

Bubble creatures are no match for steel and fire!

Pros

• Couch Co-op
  
• Great level locations
  
• Excellent AI
  
• Tops musical score
  

Cons

• Need a degree in Astro-physics to understand the spell / ability interface
  
• More customization in the heroes would have been nice
  
• No pack mule!!!