Before World of Warcraft started an army of eight million pasty-skinned minions, there was a tabletop game that would force every geek and basement-dwelling neckbeard to congregate and actually be social. That game was Dungeons and Dragons, to which it’s safe to say that every Final Fantasy and MMORPG owes its roots. While the D&D franchise has had moderate success on the PC with its hack-and-slash dungeon crawling game Neverwinter Nights, D&D makes a questionable jump to handheld consoles with Dungeons and Dragons Tactics. While hardcore D&D nerds may think this signals the end of lugging around heavy bags of books, they may not want to toss their character sheets and twenty-sided dice just yet. Not intended for the faint of heart, D&D Tactics is a faithful recreation of the 3.5 rule set that has players guiding a party of five characters through a series of quests. When I say “faithful recreation”, I really mean to say that if you’ve never even picked up a Dungeon Master’s guide, player’s handbook, or even a monster manual in your life, you’re going to be totally lost here. The learning curve makes sure to filter out anyone whose previous tactics game experiences include anything with a “Final Fantasy” or “Disgaea” in the title with loads of conditions, limits on encumbrance, spell limitations that’ll cause fireballs to backfire and blow up in your face, as well as pages upon pages of character stats. Another disheartening feature are the numerous menus you’ll have to pour through just to equip items, trade gear, or god forbid, prepare a spell to make it available to your magic user during the next adventure. Everything has a menu and numerous submenus to go along with it, which eventually starts to get into team management simulator territory rather than an enjoyable strategy RPG. Needless to say, D&D Tactics is a niche game intended for hardcore followers of the original incarnation. From the start of the game, you’ll have the option of rolling up and designing your own custom characters, which in itself can take up to an hour to do thanks in part to the clunky menus and oodles of options available to you. Luckily, you can also opt to chose from a number of prefab characters to fill out your party if you’re just plain sick of thinking up witty fantasy names like “Skincoin Deathpurse”. All of the main character races are here like elves and Halflings as well as the main character classes like Rangers, Clerics, Fighters, Barbarians, and even Bards. Once your characters are created, you can put them to the test in the game’s main story mode where you’ll take your novice adventurers on a path of glory starting with taking out a gang of pesky goblins and working your way up to taking on dragons and mind flayers. In execution, D&D Tactics plays like any other tactics game. You have a list of actions available to each character, such as moving, attacking, magic, or special abilities. The action takes place on a giant grid that shows how far your character can move during a given turn, an area of effect for a spell, or the distance you can attack. The action is turn-based where each characters initiative determines when they can make their moves. What differentiates D&D Tactics from any other strategy RPG are the numerous real-world rules that are applied to movement and combat. Dice rolls still determine whether you hit or miss a target, or whether your head explodes due to mind control. Further noobs will be turned away with every weapon they pick up – if you have no idea what a weapon dealing 1D6 +1 damage is capable of, or worse, reading that a spell can grant you and 1D4 targets a saving throw bonus of +4 and remaining clueless, you’re better off getting your strategy fix elsewhere. D&D Tactics is just that cruel. If you can pass the idiot test and want to get your D&D on, you’ll find the gameplay pretty enjoyable provided you can look past some of the obvious deficiencies of the design. Firstly, adventuring and battles are played out at a much slower pace than some console gamers would be accustomed to, with the average adventure taking upwards of an hour to complete. Also hindering the gameplay are the obvious performance issues that occur when there are a lot of characters onscreen. It seems that if you encounter more than two monsters at any given time, the game engine slows to a crawl and all audio and video go out of sync resulting in a sword clanking when something is attacked followed by a two-second pause, then the character finally animating their dodge. In some adventures, or in particular, using certain weapons and spells caused the game to lock up at certain points resulting in some unneeded regaining of ground. Thankfully, you can save the game in mid-battle, but it’s still a little hard to look over especially when you make it through an entire dungeon only to have the game lock up almost every time you attempt to attack a nomad with a frost spear. Gameplay is further hindered by the clunky menu system, which seems to suffer from performance issues of its own as it frequently stutters as you attempt to scroll through a list of spells. Further hindrance is caused if you open a chest and would like a certain character to take a particular item – which short of doing things the hard way and making each character have a turn at the chest is as nonsensical as it comes. Despite all of this, there is something enjoyable when it comes to the core gameplay. Much like gear heads love tuning every aspect of cars, D&D tactics allows you to fine-tune every aspect of your characters as much as you’d like. You’ll be able to manually assign points to certain feats and abilities if you’ve got an extra half hour to spare, or you could simply trust the game’s judgment and auto level-up when characters are de for an increase, though you won’t get as much enjoyment out of the game if you go with the latter. There are tons of options available for you to tinker with, no matter how impractical they may seem. Seriously, who would need to devote points towards a “Perform song and dance” ability in a strategy RPG? All craziness aside, character customization is extremely deep and should have the resident Eagle Scout squealing with joy at the options that are available. The only thing missing is a place to write a ten-page back-story for each character.
The game’s performance issues can surely be attributed to the fully 3D characters and rotatable world that they reside in. The environments you’ll explore are definitely the game’s best feature. Players and enemies all look good, albeit a bit small and enemies are frequently recycled. The storyline is played out through a series of well-drawn cutscenes and text that do a great job of helping things along. Unfortunately, the game’s spell effects are severely disappointing and are only designated by generic looking particles, blue cones, or bland looking flames. For those wishing for a Final Fantasy-style Magic Missile will have to wait until the sequel, sadly. The audio of the game definitely stands out compared to the relatively bland visuals. While the game’s soundtrack is commonly repeated, the music tracks are appropriate for the game’s setting whether is calm or epic, the music does an excellent job of setting the mood. When it comes to combat, however, all of the guys and gals sound exactly alike, as do monsters. You’ll also get a few anomalies where a male character will whine like a dog when hit, or a female character grunts like a guy when attacking. Compared to the excellent soundtrack, the in-game sounds are pretty tinny as if they were sampled at a much lower rate. The steep learning curve, slow combat, and unique quirks that set Dungeons and Dragons Tactics apart from standard RPGs like finding out which character will carry a torch are just too daunting and will definitely take away from the experience for anyone who hasn’t played the game in the last fifteen years. For those who devote their weekends to playing through a campaign with their friends while chugging copious amounts of Mountain Dew will definitely find joy in the faithful detail to the source material. Unless you’re a hardcore D&D player that is up to speed with the new revisions to the rules, it’s definitely in your best interests to steer clear of this game.
Other Helpful Reviews for Dungeons & Dragons Tactics
There are no lengthy stories, cut scenes, or animations to sit through. You build your party of 6 characters, or select from the pregenerated character list, and then your in a dungeon and playing. The story line that ... Read Full Review
I waited patiently for some reviews to come out before buying this game and I was a little disappointed at what I was reading. None of the reviews I read made me want to buy this game. It was not until I read the reade... Read Full Review
