Dungeon Siege III

Dungeon Siege is back! With all the dungeon crawling you love and a decent story backing it up makes for a lot of hours well spent. Developed by Obsidian and published by Square Enix this title takes you on an adventure through the land of Ehb. There are all the simple monsters you would expect from any dungeon crawler but oddly enough there are no oversized rats. This time however what is unfortunate is they took out  a lot of the customization that made the first two a lot of fun to play. You play as one of four legionnaires, a group that was nearly wiped out, is now returning to take back the land Ehb.

The story starts out with you arriving to a estate that is burning. So what just a house burning, but this house is where the legion was planning on meeting so doesn't look good. You rush into the house and seem to only see bodies of the fallen legion members. You get attacked by some mercenaries while inside and after defeating them you run into the surviving legionnaire in the basement. You run off with him while blowing up a bridge behind you. You travel to the nearest safe house hoping there might be some other survivors. The story is progressed though one big quest while there are other quests you can do as well. These side quests will unlock lore and give you money or items for your characters. This form of story progression is very bland and does not require you to really think a lot for yourself on what you should do. To contrast in the first Dungeon Siege you basically are told the world sucks because of this bad guy, good luck. Though not the deepest story it really helped you personify yourself into the character you are playing. That is not in this game. With there being only four characters to choose from with each having slight differences in story though it still doesn't feel like you are really making decisions that impact the overall story but you are just tagging along. For example there are some dialogue options where you have multiple choices but they all turn out the same in the end. The gameplay is a lot of fun but feels like it has training wheels that don't come off.

The game feels extremely simple for it to be a true dungeon crawler. There are only two weapons per character, one being good for single target and the others being good for multiple enemies. These attack animations do not change and can be very boring to look at after playing for a while. There are also the abilities you get, these are really good and fun to use, and they become unlocked at a good pace keeping it fresh. Though when it comes to upgrading your stats there is not option to do this. You instead get these skill points that will let you upgrade certain bonuses. For example one skill will let 5% of your "Will" translate into attack. Then every point in that skill will add another 5%. This makes Dungeon Siege III a lot more accessible to others who want to jump into the genre or are looking for something to warm them up for Diablo III. Though you aren't going to have spreadsheets made in order to get the best out of your character you will still have a lot of fun using the cool abilities and choosing what skills to put points into. This game seems to not want to be very ambitious and I think that this hurt the game.

What this game did well was character development along with making the world feel alive and real. Along with the graphics making combat look great. This game gives a sense of urgency and keeps you on task by limiting the amount of side quests. With them being simple go to point A get me item B and bring it back to C. These short side quests will keep completionists from spending endless hours running all over the world and keep the story flowing. What this game did not do very well was the feel of a dungeon crawler. It feels more like a top down RPG, then a grindy, gruelling, try and get the best loot and pick your stats very carefully dungeon crawler. Though there is still the loot that you can get in this game it feels very irrelevant most of the time the loot being a simple tier 1 weapon. Though not a terrible game it really does not live up to the Dungeon Siege franchise.

In the end I think this game would of done great if Dungeon Siege wasn't in the title. With the training wheels in place this game is a lot more accessible to people who choose to play it on console but as for hardcore PC gamers they might want to wait for Torchlight 2 or Diablo III. It even does control a lot better with a controller over the keyboard. It is frustrating for me to see such a good series get stripped due to wanting to being on more platforms. This game is out for PS3, Xbox 360, along with PC.