Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes is a pretty mediocre game in this genre, but will satisfy a hack and slash fix.
Heroes is your standard hack and slash RPG, much like Diablo or Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. This game doesn't cover new ground here, and the tried and true mechanics found in the other games are here. The game is divided into four areas, each with sub levels. You start the game out in the Crypts, move on to Castle Baele, then the Portals, which leads to four themed worlds (frost, necropolis, Amazon like jungle, machinery), and then the Shadow Spire, a hellish realm in the sky. By killing enemies and exploring treasure chests, you accumulate experience points, gold, and items. There are shopkeepers that you can unload your unneeded supplies and buy new ones. When your character gains levels, they acquire points that can be assigned to traits, like strength constitution, intelligence, dexterity, and wisdom, and power up points, which can be used to develop additional skills or "feats", like new abilities, new moves, allowing you to wear different armors, eye for an eye. A character status screen lists your inventory, your health potions, items, and moves learned so far.
There are plenty of offensive and defensive items, including the typical arsenal of magic potions, fire, ice, poison axes, which can have modifiers, like berserk and protect. Holding the right trigger allows quick mapping of moves/items to the X, Y, and B buttons, bypassing the player info screens. The black and white buttons allow instant consumption of health and magic potions. An automap shows where to proceed next.
When your character advances to the next level, the game doesn't give you a free refill of either health or magic. However, this is completely unnecessary, as the game isn't too difficult, and potions are plentiful, and can also be stocked up on from all the gold you collect.
There are a couple of things in the game that make it different from other hack and slash games. There is a combo and finishing move system in which successive strikes build up the power used to execute a more deadly finishing move, which needs to be learned, and each character has a few they can learn. Each character class has an ancestral weapon, which can not be sold or dropped. It is powered up by finding Soul Shards throughout the game, of which there are 20, and becomes a pretty formidable weapon late in the game.
The game camera is also more versatile than the one in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, as you have more freedom of rotating and zooming the game world. Unlike Dark Alliance, your character can't jump, but it's not necessary, and you avoid the occasional jumping sequences in Dark Alliance.
The graphics could be better, as nothing really stands out. Textures can be muddy at times, and the player models look crude and unpolished. There are a few nice effects, which include fire particle effects, the distortion of air around fire, and also the water effect that was seen in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.
The rendered cutscenes prior and after boss battles are well done, although they are not specific to the character you choose. I particularly liked the ones with the Frost Worm, in which a bird lands on it as it crumbles.
Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes is a pretty mediocre game in this genre, but will satisfy a hack and slash fix.