Dungeon Siege

The woods are crawling with all manner of beasts – wolves, Cyclops, giant flying insects and little beasties that fire magic at your party. In the crypts and tombs, spiders and giant worms attack in wave after wave. The swamps are infested with swimming and hungry life forms including dragon-like creatures. The Droog erupt from the sands near the Cliffs of Fire with an almost mindless need to attack.

Yep, it’s rough being a hero.

Dungeon Siege, from Gas-Powered Games and Microsoft, is a dungeon crawl that combines the role-playing genre with a touch of real-time strategy – but just a touch. In forums, this program is being talked about as a rival to Diablo II, but that is somewhat off base. Dungeon Siege may be a hack-and-slash RPG, and it may run along the tired lines of ‘only you can save the kingdom from the evil that threatens it,’ but this is a game that sports elements of a variety of RPG games (like Diablo and Icewind Dale or Baldur’s Gate) though in a style that is its own.

As the storyline goes, the eastern empire was crumbling and in its dying throes, the 10th Legion withdrew to the west and founded the Kingdom of Ehb. It became a model land of prosperity of peace. But something is afoot. Your avatar is a farmer working the fields when an old friend, mortally wounded, stumbles across the bridge into your land. Old Norick tells you that the Krug (a brutish race) is on the attack, something has stirred them up and perhaps the goblins are behind it. Your job is to get to Stonebridge to spread the word.

Starting with little, you begin the trek, fighting, collecting arms and leveling your character up. You will need to go through the Crypt of Sacred Blood before you can arrive at your destination. But once you arrive in Stonebridge, you will have a full inventory, and coins in your pocket. You will have the opportunity to add, not one, but up to four members (including a pack mule to carry all your booty) to your team. You will likely need it – the way grows more hazardous as you receive quest after quest, all leading your party through 14 main lands, as well as numerous byways.

Each party can hold up to eight characters, and you can arrange the troupe in formations, as well as move positions around. Should you have a sorcerer who is strong in nature magic, you can put him or her near the back of the group and have them constantly (as long as the mana holds out) cast healing winds during the battles so you don’t have to gulp healing potions. And if you do buy that pack mule, having it lead the simple formation is not a good idea.

If you run across another mercenary offering you his or her services, for a price (of course), you can dismiss team members and add to your heart’s content. Party members level up in strength, dexterity and intelligence (most weaponry and armor require certain levels in these categories in order to be used), as well as in four combat areas – melee and ranged weapons, combat and nature magic. In the case of the latter, you will need to have a spell book, and the spells in it in order to cast magic. Spells are categorized by the caster’s level in one of the two disciplines.

The control elements of this game are very simple, and should be intuitive to those who have played this type of game before. The game features a point-and-click style of mouse control with the cursor changing to indicate which non-playing characters (NPCs, controlled by the computer’s AI, or artificial intelligence) you can interact with and which characters you need to battle. It will also change across the landscape to show game players which levers need to be turned, what can be picked up, et cetera.

The game’s sound is very good. The musical soundtrack is wonderful and suits the mood of the game. It seemingly changes for each of the 14 main areas of the game. There are effects to accompany the combat and spells, death screams or the general utterances of the creatures you encounter, narration and voice work for some of the characters within the story.

The gameplay is seamless as you transition from one area of the map to another. This game is set up in chapters, each with an accompanying cutscene and plot revelation. Replayability seems to be a bit of an issue. Once you clear out a boss and/or dungeon, it stays that way for a long time. But the game does have a variety of difficulty levels and a dungeon/scene editor is in the works (it will be a download from the game’s Web site when available) so players can create their own caverns of mayhem.

All that brings us to the graphical quality of the program …

This game is magnificent. It is three-dimensional with incredibly rendered environments. The animation is smooth and the camera will let you zoom way in to the action. While characters never seem to lack, or need to replenish, ammunition for ranged weapons, you can zoom in and watch as your party launches arrows into a creature, and actually see the arrows sprout from the enemy’s hide. Some of them, like the mechanized goblin warriors, begin to look like pin cushions or chia pets before they die.

There are a variety of weapons, from magical glowing swords or axes that deliver more than just a penetrating blow, to dragon miniguns (think of them as chainguns), grenade launchers and flamethrowers and lightning guns. Some of these are not your usual array of fantasy world weapons, but can be effective against the right enemies.

Overall, though, this game is a joy for the eye.

If there are any idiosyncracies that deter from the game, they come when trying to group a team tighter to get on moving platforms. There is even a fall-away trap in the swamp that may take only a few members of your party because the formation grouping is too loose.

Dungeon Siege is wonderfully entertaining and addictive. The plot may be old hat, but until a storyteller comes up with something more creative than a hero’s struggle against an evil force threatening the land, game players are going to have to re-travel the familiar game outline. But this game succeeds on several levels.

Dungeon Siege is the type of game that RPGers will be able to immerse themselves in.

This game is rated for Teens.

Install: Medium
This is a two-disk installation, and it takes a little bit of time. With saved games, this program will eat up more than a gigabyte of hard-drive space.

Gameplay: 8.8
Aside from a few cutscenes, the game flows very smoothly from area to area. Players can create customized avatars, which are incorporated flawlessly into the cutscenes. Though the game is chapter-based, you will have a quest book with each mission listed and checked as it is completed. You may have to go back to complete those you missed as you transition from one land to another. The game has quite a nice, if not simple, options package. You can turn the dismemberment on or off, and if the color of red blood offends you, you can change it to green or turn it off as well.

Graphics: 9.4
There are some very minor clipping problems in a few scenes, and they only pop out because the rest of the game is so beautifully done. The game not only takes place on land, but in water as well. Some members of your party may actually move under a bridge.

Sound: 8.8
The sound of this game is very good and supports the graphics very well.

Difficulty: 7
Newcomers to the genre will be able to learn the controls quickly and there are several difficulty levels to challenge most game players.

Concept: 8
Same old story but fresh new look. Dungeon Siege has expanded the realm of RPGs very nicely.

Multiplayer: N/A
The game has just been released so this was not really available to test. The game will support LAN or Internet play though with up to eight players competing/playing.

Overall: 9.1
This is a joyful game to look at, and addictive to play. This game may not have the catchiest name in the realm, and its title may be indicative of what it presents, but when it comes to RPGs, this is one game that holds its own against all of the competition. It will rob players of time (as in, time will pass so quickly you may pull an all-nighter or two without realizing time is slipping past so quickly) and reward with an action-packed jaunt through an amazingly rendered land.