n the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no one questions the Scooby gang's capacity to mow through hundreds (and indeed thousands) of living or undead monstrosities, and so it is with old-time varmint-stomping goldies like Diablo and Diablo II and their innumerable progeny. So, too, the latest critter-clobbering cruise, Dungeon Siege II, an unapologetic reworking of its predecessor's hack-and-slash pageantry trumpeting an augmented plot and quest system, and deeper character growth options.
Set in the mystical realm of Aranna, Dungeon Siege II tells the story of a naive mercenary soldier initially pitching for the wrong (read: evil and merciless) team. It seems that when Aranna was young, two forces clashed in a war for dominion of the continent. In a final battle of sorts, the collision of a mystical sword and shield ripped the souls from the surrounding armies and plunged them into the land, creating unholy rivers of magic. Centuries later, a power-mad warrior named Valdis—also bent on dominating the lands—has uncovered the original mystical sword and is seeking the shield (in pieces) to clinch his ascendancy, one invasion at a time.
Using the mouse and a variety of keyboard hotkeys, players direct a party of characters—up to four on easy difficulty, scaling to six on veteran—through gauntlets of fantasy creatures to complete primary and secondary quests. While the main character must be generated from one of four classes (ranger, fighter, combat mage, nature mage) and races (human, dryad, elf, half-giant) which correspond to the expected range of melee, ranged or magical skills, additional party members either join later, or can be purchased as pets. The pet system invites players to purchase creatures such as elementals or scorpions that can be "fed" nearly any weapon, magic item, or piece of armor from the party's inventory. Through the course of many feedings, the pet "grows" and gains skills relative to its dietary habits; feed an ice elemental enchanted ranged weapons, and it gains bonuses to long range magical attacks. Experience and advancement in general is still constituent upon skill or item use, thus attacking with a sword or staff over time raises a character's melee skill, while blasting away with "jolt" or "ice bolt" spells raises combat and nature magic levels respectively. One notable new feature is the inclusion of an ability system that, upon level advancement, allows players to add skills such as "fortitude," "deadly strike" and "dual wield" to a character's repertoire.
The main story involves thwarting Valdis and saving Aranna, but the majority of the game is broken into mini-quests, in turn broken into three primary acts. Each act has main and secondary quests—completing the main quests advances the story, while the secondary quests are optional and serve both to flesh out the main story as well as beef up the party. Multiplayer is cooperative only, allowing up to four players to journey together through the story, and additional difficulty levels (veteran and elite) can be "unlocked" by completing the game's easy (mercenary) level.
Sublimely addictive
Buckle into your comfy chair and assume your best anti-repetitive-motion-injury position, because Dungeon Siege II is the most addictive incarnation of the "click-click-click-click" genre since Diablo II. Yes, on the one hand it's terribly familiar—even monotonous during a few of the lengthier slogs, but the developers have gone to great lengths to keep things interesting by salting with gorgeous, always-changing scenery, and peppering with 10 times the number of side quests found in the original.
What could have been a very poor continuation of Dungeon Siege's flaws (linear combat with nominal side quests and character expansion) turns out instead to be a blissful, mindless romp with dozens of branching quests and deeper character options. The inclusion of a specialty skill system is hardly innovative, but innovation is one-tenth of good gameplay if the execution's off. Developer Gas Powered Games wanted to give players more depth without compromising the focus on combat, and they've clearly succeeded by adding the sort of meaningful abilities typically reserved for much more complex RPGs. Coupled with the clever pet system, party tweaking is just the right amount of sophisticated without keeping players away from the action for more than a minute or two at a time. The difficulty level feels just about right as well—not as easy as some have suggested, but never too difficult to hold things up for more than one or two retries. When you're slogging through thousands of monsters an hour, the last thing you want to deal with are artificially difficult encounters—especially when the game's over 40 hours long.
Visually Dungeon Siege II is as arresting as Dungeon Siege was three years ago, though close-up zooms betray rough and ugly textures that don't scale well. From a comfortable overhead distance, though, nothing beats Dungeon Siege II's engine for modeling flourishing vegetal environments and craggy windswept spires. Generally smooth and lag-free, the game occasionally exhibits performance issues which inexplicably drag the frame rate down into the stuttering teens on even a blistering fast nVidia GeForce 7800GTX video card. The voice acting isn't half as bad as it's been portrayed elsewhere, certainly no worse than the melodramatic pulp in something like Neverwinter Nights. (Can anyone name a well-acted video game at this point anyway?) Audio is, in fact, put to tremendous use—it's been a long time since I really noticed Creative Labs' EAX environmental audio effects, which make Aranna's jungle, desert and mountainous environs an aural treat.
In the end, whether Dungeon Siege II is a shining example of its genre, or another mindless trip to the eye-candy counter, comes down to whether you like this sort of thing or not. The minority of RPG purists may balk, and perhaps rightly so, but the mainstream RPG-lite crowd will find everything (short of innovation) they've been looking for in a lengthy, rousing gallop of a story with souped up character development.
Don't believe everything you read—Dungeon Siege II is plenty difficult for typical gamers, and while it breaks absolutely no new ground, it's still the pinnacle of hack-and-slash gaming to date.
—Matt
Back to the top.
