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Faithfully utilizing the D&D 3.5 rule-set, Dungeons & Dragons®:Tactics will allow players to take a party of six adventurers into a wide variety of dangerous environments and experience the ultimate RPG adventure.
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This game is simply the most fun I've ever had with a PSP game. No, it's not perfect D&D, it's missing multi-classing and a few skills and feats. But it's damn close, and you get more character customization than you're going to find in any other PSP game anywhere, guaranteed.
If you've ever played "Temple of Elemental Evil" game for the PC, this looks and plays very similarly. The focus here is a little less on role-playing and more on fighting though (but that's why it's called D&D Tactics).
The game is LONG too. I spent about 92 hours on the campaign and finally finished it. You start at level 1. I don't know what the highest level you can hit, but everyone in my party got up to level 19. Even after you complete the campaign, you can go through it again, and make some different choices about which dungeons to explore, or whether to lean toward good or evil, so there is a fair amount of replay value.
-Graphics are smooth, colorful, and fantastic. Almost every spell has it's own animation. Each character has a unique look, and you can customize their hair and faces to a certain extent.
-Sound is wonderful, and there's a wide range of background music. There's even a sound player option so you can play the music during your pencil & paper games if you want.
-Gameplay would be hard at first if you have no knowledge of D&D, but soon anyone will learn it. There are lots of ingame help available on just about everything.
Game balance may be a bit off, my party was leveling faster than the game was expecting, and I was going through some adventures 2-3 levels higher than I should have. You can mitigate this by switching characters between adventures though.
The manual is a little lacking. It doesn't tell you that hitting the "select" button will zoom the screen in and out. It's a very useful feature that I discovered by accident. I wonder if some of the negative reviews here are by people who never figured that trick out?
My biggest problem with the game is that I'm already dying for a sequel!Read more ›
I love Dungeons and Dragons, playing it with two different groups twice a week. I also love handheld tactical games, with some of my favorite handheld games of all times being tactics-style. So when this product was announced, I found myself waiting for it with 'bated breath. And waiting. And waiting.
The screenshots and video looked good, the press releases and interviews and previews all seemed to suggest that things were heading in the right direction, a tactics game with great graphics, based around the complex (and carefully thought out) 3.5 edition D&D rules. Each time it was delayed, I dared to hope that it was because they were taking the time to really get it right.
Having now played a good chunk of the game, I think that what was instead happening during the delays was that the development team, overburdened by the complexity of what they had set out to do, was simplifying and reducing, getting rid of stuff that didn't work, dropping features that were too hard to complete, and just generally scaling back the ambitions for the project until its parameters fit within what they had already done, rather than what they had set out to do.
It is a reasonably fun game nonetheless. Controlling a party of six adventurers, representing the base D&D classes, plus a couple extra psionic ones, is relatively fulfilling. It's even a decent tactics game in some ways, with the step by step planning of what your characters will do, and the mutual supporting interactions between them. This fundamental enjoyment is what pushes my overall rating of the game up from 1 to 2 star status.
But there are two important respects in which it falls very short.
First, as a tactics game, the controls are finicky. It's hard to get a good overview of the situation, in part because the 3D rendering is so intensive that the poor PSP's responses are jerky rather than smooth. Lighting is also a problem, with the lighting conditions being based on which character is selected, rather than on what lighting pertains overall. This means that if you have a character without a light source of their own, you sometimes can't see clearly, even if they're standing next to two or three other characters with light sources. Area effect spells are hard to position, because some of them cover so many squares that you can't see the edges of the selected region.
It also lacks any tactical finesse. The scenarios are straightforward, and its really more about using your party's "brute force" capabilities to batter opponents into submission. The computer's AI doesn't take advantage of all the available rules, so the game never really gives you a chance to explore the tactical depth of which those rules are capable.
Finally, the menu based controls are complex and slow. Moving equipment from party member to party member is excrutiating, picking options in combat requires you to navigate a multi-level menu tree, and the interface for leveling up manually is so cumbersome they included an "auto level" ooption. This will provide a hefty barrier to entry to anyone that just wants to pick up the game and play, and would only be forgivable if the complexity was to support the depth of D&Ds complicated ruleset.
Which it doesn't.
The second problem with the game is that when they started cutting corners, they began hacking off parts of the rules system that were inconvenient to them, or changing things to work around bugs or missing features they'd decided to abandon. Here's what I've noticed so far:
* No multiclassing * Opponents never use the 5 foot step to avoid attacks of opportunity. They always take a "move" action, even if they're only going 5 feet. Spellcasters never "step back" to cast spells. * Metamagic feats cause all spells that _could_ be affected to be affected at all times. So, if you take the "Widen Spell" feat, all of your fireballs will have a 40' radius. You can't turn it off, and it still uses a 3rd level slot. (Fireball is pretty unusable in the game anyway, since you can't tell if it's going to hit an obstruction and blow up on top of you, but taking widen spell turns it into a spell that you almost never get to cast.) * Undead are subject to critical hits. * They're only using a fraction of the possible creature base. I'm a good chunk of the way in, at 10th level, and I keep encountering the same kinds of creatures again and again. (werewolves, anyone?). * Burning hands doesn't appear to be castable. (Don't know why, but it never lets me cast it.) * Magic missles must all be directed against a single target. * Lightning bolt is a single target spell. * If the character you designate as your "main" character dies, combat immediately ends with a "FAILURE!". Not very D&D-like. * No prestige classes. (see no multiclassing, above.) * Things stack that shouldn't. Bracers of Armor stack with armor bonuses, for example. * No secret doors. (or at least, if there are, I haven't found them.) * A character moving through an allies square is never subject to an AOO. * Even high skill tumblers can't tumble through an opponent's space. * If you take a full attack action, both attacks end up directed against the same opponent, even if the first hit kills that opponent and there's another opponent in reach. * No school specialization, so your wizard won't have many spells. I recommend a sorcerer, since there aren't a lot of non-combat spells. * A cleric with a weapon in one hand and a shield in the other can't cast spells. (It's well established in the rules that the cleric can move the weapon to the shield hand in order to allow this.) * No paladin mount. * Power attack has non-adjustable intensity. (i.e. you can't select how much of it you're using.) * You're not allowed to assist other character's attacks or ACs. This is a fairly minor rule in regular D&D, but since its specifically marketed as a Tactics game, this seems like a strange thing to leave out. * Monsters never have treasure, it's all in chests scattered about the map. * If you kill the last monster, you never get to open any chests you hadn't reached yet. * Turning undead always destroys them, never turns them. * Bardic Music doesn't follow the rules for same. It clearly gives allies a bonus, but what bonus exactly is clearly not quite in line with the original rules.
I'm sure there's more, but its a hodge-podge of rules changes. Some made in order to accomodate the electronic nature of the game, to be sure, but many made just because the developers either didn't understand, or didn't bother to implement, the original rules' intent.
The sad part is, you can see the bones of a much more expansive (and exciting) game here, but they just failed to deliver. What's left is a reasonably fun set of dungeon crawls with a clunky interface.
Who knows, handhelds keep growing in power, maybe they'll get it right next time.Read more ›
There are few games in the past ten years that have given me satisfying turn-based tactical combat experience. This one has. I currently DM pen and paper D&D and have found this gem to hold up very well against the ruleset. Sure, there is very little in the way of role-play elements, but truth be told, you can't role play on a computer (AI) worth a darn any way (reading page after page of "story dialogue" and choosing from a tree of contrived responses in not what I call roleplaying) , so this gets right down to brass tax; turn based combat.
Character creation is very involved and exciting; the experience point system has been accelerated, so leveling happens often (maybe a little too often, actually, as the lower levels offer excitement that is entirely different from mid and high level characters). Atari has included most major feats and their implementation comes off well. The skill system is fully included, but a bit deceiving. With the lack of RP elements, I haven't seen any use for knowledge skills (or other non-combat skills) and wonder why they were included. Had I known the game was almost strictly combat based, I would have configured my skills differentally for each character before starting.
The in-combat interface works well. Line-of-sight seems to be right on and using cover seems to affect my characters chances of being hit. What this game desparately needs is a status screen that shows a breakdown of your numbers (i.e. if your AC is showing 17, there is no way to tell how you arrived at that number, you have to figure it out yourself). Also the game lacks a numerical breakdown of the damage each character does in combat, or even the potential damage you could do based on your weapon, base attack and feats.
I hope Atari comes out with a patch that brings the background numbers out so the player can see them. A real character sheet would be such a welcome addition (the interface for viewing each character's stats is terrible). As far as I can tell at this point, there is no numeric data that shows what spell(s) each character is currently affected by (just a generic symbol over his head). Without these fixes, this game will have a hard time finding a group to identify with as it won't satify the hardcore players enough and will likely confuse and frustrate the casual player.
All-in-all, though, I have been glued to this game before going to bed every night. Each weapons and suit of armor has been rendered (although there is no close-up vanity view of your character). All items, feats, skills, etc. have a detailed description available at any time. If you plan on picking this up - do youself a HUGE favor, if you don't already own it, pick up the Players Handbook to go along with this title because you WILL reference it! I look forward to the the next title in this series (fingers crossed) - I bet it will be spot on!
UPDATE: Here I am, a couple years later, haplessly waiting for the next title in this series. Obviously, this isn't going to happen (to my knowledge). It is an absolute shame as this was a one-of-a-kind product. Today's gamer apparently has no time for tactical turn-based games as there is nothing on the market (within the past few years) that captures the true essence of pen and paper tactical Dungeons and Dragons combat such as this title. I have found myself playing this again over the past few weeks (I still haven't beat it after 45+ hours of gameplay). There is so much that should improve on this game; the clumsy interface, the seemingly endless list of bugs, lock-ups, confusing iso-views, characters develop faster than the adventures require, etc. But at the core, this is an awesome D&D 3.5 combat experience. It is too bad this title didn't hold enough of an audience to spawn a sequel; I can't imagine the anount of work that went into this engine and I hate to see it abandoned :(Read more ›
