Dungeon Siege III Review

Loot! Loot! Loot! It’s the point to role-playing games and it’s always found in a chest at the end of the dungeon. But is the loot in Dungeon Siege III worth taking the crawl for? From Obsidian Entertainment, the developers behind Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol, Dungeon Siege III is a very Marmite game; you either love it or you don’t.

The kingdom of Ehb has been torn apart and the protectors of the land, the 10th Legion, have been disgraced. You play as one of the few remaining members of the group, travelling around Ehb defeating a plethora of monsters to restore order to the world. The story of Dungeon Siege III all relies on the opening cinematic and if you don’t understand that then you have no chance of following the tale that the game weaves.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t exactly connect with me but we doubt Dungeon Siege III is a game you’re going to pick up if you want to experience a fantastic narrative. Instead, you’re probably going to play it for loot and if that’s what you want, then you’re in for a treat. Kill this, collect that, gain experience points, kill some more, level up, assign points, collect more items; this is the general design of Dungeon Siege III and it works.

Like most RPGs, you start off at levello uno, as nothing more than a character with a weapon. But the more you kill and the more you earn, you quickly transform from a useless character to a killing machine with an axe. The levelling system works, like most RPGs, by assigning different points to different areas which will then upgrade your magic, your weapons and other items.

Our biggest problem with the levelling system is also the game’s biggest problem as a whole; the presentation of it. Whilst the menus look lovely and are well designed, they don’t exactly show things clearly and can leave you wondering how to do something even after reading the tutorial paragraph three or four times. To find out how to do the things you need to, you are forced to read through pages and pages in the help section and this quickly becomes tedious and a pain. It’s a shame because when you finally work out what to do, the game suddenly becomes a lot of fun.

Another annoying aspect of the game is the fact that it revolves around orbs; you collect orbs to restore health and magic. In most RPGs, you collect potions to boost stats whenever you need it but in Dungeon Siege III, if you need more health, you had better hope the next enemy you kill drops an orb. This takes away from the RPG feel of it and slowly makes you feel like you’re playing a hack-and-slash title instead of a dungeon crawler.

The gameplay of Dungeon Siege III is actually very addictive. As simple as it sounds (kill this, collect that), there is a certain amount of satisfaction in defeating a particularly difficult boss or clearing a dungeon that’s been causing you a lot of trouble. The simple yet effective fighting mechanic helps the game considerably as it’s very easy to use but incredibly challenging to master. With the click of a button you’re hacking away at all manner of enemies but before long you’re performing special moves and including magic in your attacks.

The spells cast also look very nice, too. In fact, the whole game looks nice. The PC we played it on was powerful enough to perform some very nice lighting effects with the caves looking particularly impressive as they were dark, brooding and intense. Buildings look very impresssive, too, and the draw distance can be quite nice. The character models are by no means bad but they do leave a little to be desired with the mouths not quite syncing with the sound.

The audio as a whole, however, is incredibly disappointing. The voice acting is good and the sound effects as a whole were rather impressive; what let it all down however is that, sometimes, the audio jittered and broke up. It sounds like the characters were speaking through a fan. When a game relies on you to concentrate and listen to the dialogue as much as this one does, it’s incredibly frustrating when the sound breaks completely and you literally can’t understand what they’re saying. It was a big disappointment and stood out like a sore thumb. There are subtitles but we can’t imagine anyone who would sit through and read the amount of text this game throws at you.

Other than the sometimes juddering dialogue, the speech system works fine but is nothing that you haven’t seen before. Compared with games like Mass Effect, it’s hardly anything special and is far from delivering anything that Fallout 3 or Dragon Age can provide. But it does what a normal speech system should and nothing more.

That last comment describes Dungeon Siege III perfectly; it does what a good RPG should but doesn’t excel at anything in particular. The graphics are good but the occasional poor texture brings you out of the experience; the fighting is simple but isn’t up there with that found in Dragon Age and the speech system is good but not brilliant. That makes Dungeon Siege III sound like a bad game and it’s truly not. At times, it can be a lot of fun and searching for the loot at the end of the map is as satisfying as it’s ever been. Although the loot at the end is sometimes worth fighting and dying for, the journey you must take to get there is full of trouble and disappointment that some will love and others will become bored of very quickly.