Mini Review – Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale

RPG

Think of the fun you could be having.

Gareth

I know very little about the Dungeons & Dragons universe, but I know my games and I know my RPGs and this recently released XBLA game is a bad one.

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale is a loot ’em up. There are four character types, four chapters to play through and the lack of any story is not supposed to matter as the quest for loot should be enough to guide you through. Well, to say there is no story is strictly speaking not true, but I can sum it up for you right here. Four heroes get summoned to take out an evil man. That’s it. That framework could be levelled at a lot of games, but at least they try to flesh it out a bit. Lack of story is the least of this game’s troubles though.

Clatto Verata N... Necktie... Neckturn... Nickel... It's an "N" word, it's definitely an "N" word!

The quests you take on the road to this evil man have nothing to do with the story and simply have you killing X amount of enemies or collecting X number of items or (sweet Jesus) escorting someone somewhere. There is little to no variation in the mission structure and whether you’re doing a main quest line or a side quest you’re still going to have to run through the same environment killing the same respawning enemies over and over.

As long as the loot is good and you can customise your character enough it’s all cool though right? That would be true, but Daggerdale can’t even get that right. The four character types are Human Fighter, Elven Rogue, Halfling Wizard and Dwarven Cleric. Apart from the name you have no control over how your character appears. You can customise your character’s stats and skills to a certain extent but the game caps your level at a measly 10 and you can’t upgrade everything every level so even if I go in a completely different direction with my rogue than someone else we’re still going to be largely the same.

Even the loot is disappointing. At no point did I find something that made me feel or look awesome. You can get glowing armour and weapons but that has nothing to do with level so you can have glowing stuff at level 2 so by the time you reach level 10 you aren’t impressed by such things any more.

Worst of all though are the bugs. This is the buggiest game I’ve played in a long time and I thought Microsoft had some sort of quality control going on. Within a minute the first guy you talk to breaks the game. He starts talking (all text, there is little speech in the game) and then the speech box disappears and the camera stays fixed on the dwarf as you run around behind him. It did eventually break free, whether it was something I did or not I have no idea, but I’m not the only person to experience this and this is within the first sixty seconds.

There are also the issues with pop-up, screen tearing, unresponsive controls, lag in single player (?), skills deassigning themselves, the inability to save after objectives are complete, only after completely finishing a quest (losing loot in the progress), enemies remaining standing when killed, lack of compare function in your inventory and simply poor production all round. I could go on to be honest but I actually have a life to live and I don’t want to be here all day.

Oh, there is also a co-op mode for up to four players online (which works reasonably well and only with four people on the final boss did I really get any problems where it became almost unplayable with slowdown) and two player local (tethered to the same screen) but if you convince anyone to play this with you then you’re a bad person.

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale is a poor, poor game. About the only thing I can say they’ve done right is the random character name generator (assuming it is random), the rest is pretty much entirely awful. The quest for loot can still be addictive but you’ll quickly realise that it really doesn’t matter here. The game ends with a cliffhanger ending but if they release a sequel to this (I believe a trilogy was planned) then they better go back to the drawing board because this game fails at the most basic level.

3/10