Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Review - good idea, great setting, bad execution

When you hear Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), most immediately think of the fantasy tabletop roleplaying game where players roll dice and perform voices for their characters  in order to immerse themselves in the experience. As one of the most popular games in the world with some of the richest lore, it’s no surprise that it would form the basis for yet another four-player co-op action game.

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a third-person action-RPG that can be played solo or in a party with up to three other players. The premise is simple: you pick one of four known D&D heroes to play as, and run through a variety of stages, slaying monsters, gathering loot, and leveling up to then take on tougher stages and so on.

The aforementioned playable characters are the dual-sword-wielding drow ranger Drizzt Do'Urden, the axe and shield-bearing dwarf Bruenor Battlehammer, the human archer Catti-brie, and lastly the hammer-swinging human barbarian Wulfgar. 

Loot and experience isn't shared among the characters, so you'll need to play each character separately to level them up. The only thing shared amongst them is stage progress, so don't worry about having to unlock all the stages again whenever you switch characters. 

The stages are standard fare - running down hallways with the occasional branching path, taking down various enemies while picking up loot along the way, and repeating the above until you reach the boss of each zone, whose death terminates the level. Each area on the map is divided into three stages, and at each level’s end, a themed boss awaits.

Experience and loot are only awarded upon completing a stage, and loot can come in many forms such as gold, ore, skill upgrade materials, and attribute points. But the primary loot that you'll be looking at is equipment. Equipment appears with different strengths, passive effects, and rarities. Higher rarities obviously offer better overall stats and higher upgrade levels. More special attacks for each character will be unlocked once you reach certain levels, as well as access to more items that can be brought into stages.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? It sure is. The problem lies in the execution, which is why this game belongs in the lower echelon of its sub-genre. 

Could we have a little more variety, please?

First of all, Dark Alliance’s performance leaves a lot to be desired. The game runs at an unlocked framerate but can drop to around 20fps, give or take, when enemies and effects begin to populate the screen, and it doesn't take a lot to tank the framerate. I know that FPS drops aren't the end of the world and all, but what grinds my gears is when your button inputs are lost amidst the slowdown, making for a sometimes very underwater gaming experience, an issue that's doubly compounded by the general unresponsiveness of the controls.

The performance woes don't end there. The worst outlier is the weird and consistent screen tearing, which can be caused by something as simple as moving the camera. It's extra weird how the screen tears move upwards - it’s like watching the refresh rate on an old CRT. Visual bugs also plague the experience. It’s nothing majorly game-breaking, but these bugs can manifest in the form of invisible fire with an active hitbox, which can stagger and damage your characters. The noticeably long load times don't help either.

But by far the most agonizing part of the review process was the gameplay. Putting aside the stiff and sometimes unresponsive controls, which makes the already boring combat feel so much worse and almost unfair at higher difficulties, the overall structure of the game is uninspired. 

Nearly all of your actions per stage invoke the same routine of running down empty hallways that lead into obvious open combat areas. Those areas lead into more hallways, and so on ad infinitum. Finding secrets is as simple as checking corners for possible shorter paths that lead to treasure chests. You’ll get an occasional branching route that only really exists to pad out stages with mini-goals, such as finding a hidden named enemy to slay, or something as mundane as collecting ten dwarf mugs. These mini-goals stay the same for each stage, and completing them doesn't yield any substantial rewards, which makes them really easy to ignore.

Since experience earned is determined by the stage upon completion, you don’t even need to kill enemies aside from the required end boss, and perhaps a few that need to be slain to open locked doors. As mentioned, new attacks are unlocked at certain levels. While I can admit that some of the attack animations look cool, such as Drizzt’s summoning a giant shadow panther from beneath the floor to gnaw enemies, it takes way too long to reach those levels, and functionally, the new attacks are moot. In terms of both damage and combos, you basically get the same results you’d get from using your base attacks.

This Loot is not worth dying for

The main goal, then, of all the mundane combat and "dungeon exploring" is to acquire epic loot and gear, then strengthen your characters to be able to tackle higher difficulty versions of the same stages that have higher rarity loot drop rates. 

At least, they supposedly have higher rarity drop rates. From what I’ve experienced, it doesn’t seem to matter what difficulty you play on, as I found myself getting low rarity gear on nearly every stage. It really doesn't help that the enemy variety isn't all that diverse either. You'll be fighting the same types of goblins, dwarves, orges, and liches over and over again. The end bosses are just the larger grunt variant, but physically larger, sporting more health, and having maybe one new attack.

I'd like to dive into the online aspect of this game, since it's clear that the primary method to experience Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is to play with three other people as a full party. However, we were only able to connect to one player after waiting in queue for literally hours, only to be met with a subpar connection.

Plenty of quality cut-scenes

The only praise I can offer this title is directed towards the cutscenes. They're well animated, well voiced, and are written to be quite entertaining and charming. If anything, I'd like to see a full animated movie done with the same quality.

Dark Alliance seems like a shovelware title for a property that doesn't exist. It may be linked to the D&D tabletop RPG, but it feels like a slipshod tie-in for a supposedly popular movie or show. I was left constantly asking the question, "who is this for?" Regular D&D players have no need to play this game, since they're already playing the original, superior version of the IP. And I am certain that new players curious to learn about the D&D universe won't find anything of value here.

I personally find it hard to fault a game when it sports a lower than average asking price on launch, but I cannot recommend this game to anyone. It's been nothing but a frustrating experience all throughout, with no redeeming gameplay qualities. But hey, at least the cutscenes were nice.

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3/10

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Highlights

PROS

• Cutscenes are nicely animated and voiced

CONS

• Performance issues

• Unresponsive controls

• Mundane gameplay loop with no real payoffs

What I’ve Played

• Finished the main campaign on various difficulties

• Played as all 4 characters

• [This review is based on a PS4 review code provided by Ripples.]

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