MadCap's Game Reviews - "Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale"

I know that this is going to shock a lot of people out there, but I feel that I need to be entirely and completely honest with you. After all, you're my audience and you've been with me for over 100 game reviews - not even getting into my television, comic, and film reviews that are also available here on my blog (click now and avoid the rush!). So, I have decided that I need to come clean with something about myself.

I love Dungeons & Dragons.

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I'll give you all a moment to absorb that.

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So, needless to say, you shouldn't be too shocked that I'm covering a Dungeons & Dragons game. Considering, you know, I've done a couple of reviews in that vein before now. Thus, Daggerdale, a hack and slash game set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons and I know I'm losing a lot of my more mainstream audience. You don't really need to worry all that much about the D&D settings - of which there are several - as playing this game doesn't actually require you to go into the specifics of the setting in order to enjoy it.

Basically a mage from a group of evil mages is trying to take over Daggerdale for Bane, the god of darkness and naughty black evil who he worships.  A former Banite priestess decides to craft four special rings and gives them to four special adventurers so that, with their powers combined, they can summon Toril's greatest champion - Captain Planet!

Actually the game immediately hits a wall before the cutscene that sets everything up when the player is given options for character creation - and I say "options" in the loosest sense of the word.  Whereas pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons and several of the video game adaptations give you a staggering amount of races and classes to choose from...Daggerdale only gives you eight.  And they're all locked by class and race so, really, only four - a human fighter, a dwarven cleric, an elven rogue, and a halfing wizard. And no, actually, you can't customize your character even within those limitations. At all.

Now I can understand that programming has its limitations, but this game originally came out in 2011. By comparison, Neverwinter Nights - which I already covered - came out in 2002, and allowed all Third Edition Core Classes and several Prestige classes on top of allowing several different races. And that was nine years before this came out. I've read that future DLC would add more, but that doesn't help the game here.

Not that the game here can be helped that much.  The game is listed as an action RPG, but is really not much more than a hack n' slash. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but this is D&D. It deserves to be more than a simple hack n' slash game that is third person and thankfully doesn't have a fixed camera angle. You have your four attacks, the inputs for the interface are fairly self-explanatory and you can very easily just pick it up and start hacking. Simple enough for a hack n' slash.

And as a hack n' slash, it's alright. It's even good.  As a Dungeons & Dragons game, though?  Not so much. And because it has the Dungeons & Dragons name slapped on the cover, I'm afraid I'm going to have to give this one a thumbs down.

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale is now available from Bedlam Games and Atari for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

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