Dungeon Siege 2 Review

It's good when you get your review code from a company well before the game is supposed to hit the shelves (which would be right about the time it goes gold). It's good because a reviewer has time to truly review all of the game's finer points, and secondly, the readers get a timely article, giving them a few more bits of data on the product they're thinking of buying. So, my thanks to Microsoft for showing enough common sense and courtesy to do this. I wish many other publishers, some of which are notoriously tardy, would have enough foresight to handle things in this manner.

I got the Mace of Agarrus - I'm an uber geek!

Freaking ghosts of dead EA employees!

That said, I really did not have enough time to review Dungeon Siege 2. Sometimes, the line between reviewing a game and simply playing it for the very reason everyone else plays games - which is to have fun - is blurred, which is a good thing. Besides making my job a lot more enjoyable, it also offers the reader a valuable pointer as to whether they should buy the game or not (providing they are familiar with you or they care about your opinion). Fortunately for Gas Powered Games, "the line" *was* blurred with Dungeon Siege 2. To me at least, this is the single-most important thing when reviewing a game - and it will often influence the score to a good degree, tipping the scale in its favor even if many of the objective parameters suggest otherwise.

Ever since World of WarCraft happened to me, I cannot help by measure every single RPG (online or not) against what I consider the pinnacle of an addictive gaming experience. Granted, for more reasons than one, this comparison is unfair in relation to single-player RPGs, but the way I see it, the truly great gaming experience (one that is truly addictive), is that which not only makes you lose track of time, but when you finally peel your eyes away from the monitor, you're still feeling that slight numbness in your body as your mind tries to adjust to the real world. Without sounding too crass, this is pretty much how I felt after I've gotten my first really good and sufficiently lengthy blow job (From a woman? -Mo). As ridiculous as this may sound, the two feelings are fairly comparable. But we're straying from the subject a bit...

Back to Dungeon Siege 2... yes, Dungeon Siege 2 did give me that great buzz that lingers a bit after playing, the kind of buzz that I'd get from a good session in the Warsong Gulch, or one of the classic PvP encounters at the good-old Tarren Mill. When talking in buzz-terms (yeah, I'm making things up as I go), Dungeon Siege 2 gave me a buzz that wasn't as intense as I'd get from playing World of WarCraft, but was certainly bigger than the one I got from playing Guild Wars, or some of the newer single-player action RPGs. Admittedly, the science of buzzing is not really a science - it's highly subjective and inaccurate, but so are game reviews. I'm simply giving you my subjective opinion of the feeling I got from playing the game. If you ask me (and not that anyone is, but still), action RPGs are about this buzz and the immersion in a carefully crafted fantasy game world governed by a certain type of rules set forth by the developers.

Surprisingly, while still managing to have this effect on me, Dungeon Siege 2 is far from being perfect. If I had to find the reasons why I was attracted to the game so much, I'd say that the primary cause, without a doubt, would be the side-quests. The main story has its natural progression, and it's relatively interesting, but if you decide to simply rush through the levels, trying to follow the main plot line at the quickest pace possible, there is a very strong chance you will dislike the sequel in the end. Not that the main campaign is not good enough, it's just that there is a whole world in Dungeon Siege 2 to be discovered beyond the main quest line. This is a game for patient explorers who don't mind turning every single rock on every single map in order to find clues that point to the location of an epic weapon that you would dearly like to have one of your heroes wield. In many ways, Dungeon Siege 2 reminded me of old school adventure games with an action RPG twist - you would sometimes solve interesting puzzles, or uncover a sequence of hidden areas to reach your goal. For me that was probably the biggest reason why I was sucked in once again into the world of Aranna and the many branching little paths that it had to offer.

Another important reason why I liked the sequel is the good feeling of the battles, and some satisfying boss encounters, even though the regular fights were, admittedly, too simplistic when actual fighting is concerned. But more on that a bit later...

The character progression has been improved greatly with the addition of a talent tree, similar to what you can find in World of WarCraft. The nice twist to this system is the addition of Powers. These are really powerful spells (or abilities) with cool downs, which you can level by specializing in certain branches of your main profession. The good thing here is that you don't have to have one main profession, and you are not really limited in this way. Depending on your fighting style, you can specialize in range, melee combat, combat magic, or nature magic. Each of these main schools branches off further via the talent tree, which is where the powers tie in. If you are mostly a combat magician and you specialize in death magic, you will level up the power that is tied to this specific branch of the talent tree - a purple scythe that swirls over the heads of your enemies, dealing damage in a designated area and transferring a percentage of the damage as health to your party members. As a melee fighter you can choose to specialize in tanking or dual wielding (and playing more like a rogue), but then you can also use combat magic from time to time, which would make you a fighting mage. You develop your character as you play in a very natural fashion - it is seamless and it feels right. Another good thing about the combat system is the ability to equip your characters with auto-cast spells. I chose to equip the ranger in my party (a Dryad girl) with lesser healing spells, which helped out a great deal during some tough fights.

The reason I said that the combat is too simplistic, however, is because I was rarely required to change the spells that I'm using with my spellcasters. The choice would mostly come down to the type of creatures we were fighting (as some are resistant to certain types of magic), but most of the other work would boil down to using health or mana pots while pausing the action (this system works the same way as in the original - when in a tight spot, pause the action to figure out your next move), or making sure that my main tank (a rather depressed-sounding Half-giant) would use his power that draws most of the aggro on him to save the rest of the group. Granted, I may be a bit spoiled by the more complex combat mechanics in World of WarCraft and Guild Wars, but the important thing is that the combat itself was sufficiently fluid to keep me busy and focused on the action.

Where the combat system fails the most, however, is the AI. It's not so much your teammates' AI, as you have options to adjust their formation and group tactics to increase their efficiently. It's rather the sluggish response of the enemy AI that made the game a bit less challenging than it should've been. Again, this might not be a mistake in programming as much as it is a bad design decision - you unlock higher levels of difficulty (intended for players, levels 40-69, and then 70-100) by finishing the game at the standard one first. Obviously, this is to increase the game's replay value, but I still don't think this was a wise decision.