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Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale
“…this is one of those buffalo chips of a game that promises something and completely loses itself where QA could have caught the majority of issues that made this such a lackluster game. – by Justin Nauss
Supported Platforms:
PC, XBLA
Facts/Features:
- Single Player/Up to Four Player Co-Op/Action/Rpg/3rd Person/Dungeon Crawler
- Rated for Blood and Violence.
Known Performance Issues:
- Can get stuck on objects in the environment.
- Can get stuck in cut scenes.
- Sometimes quests don’t finish because you are still stuck in the cut scene.
Mechanics
- Flow: 2
- Consistency: 4
- Communication: 3
Visuals
- Frame Rate: 3
- Textures: 2
- Effects: 4
Sound
- Effects: 2
- Interference: 1
Score: 2.5 out of 5
Review
Mechanics
- Flow: This game is always breaking up the action. You can do one quest at a time. You sometimes get a unnecessary number of enemies blocking where you need to go; and you are always doing the same thing. It never feels like you are leveling fast enough and the reward for all the pain is minimal at best with the loot, gold, and the leveling up (which only goes to 10). Added to the already copious amount of bugs that were too many to list, this game is always pulling you out of the action.
- Consistency: This game is probably one of the most repetitive in the genre. You do almost the same quests in each area; and they are almost always in the same order. The environments don’t vary much as well so that aspect can also add to the repetitive nature of the game. I knew I had to rate something ok on this game; and this was the only category that I could do so on.
- Communication: This game does have multiplayer which could honestly be okay, but it doesn’t deviate from the norm. You are just using either Steam Speak or XBL. It doesn’t let you do anything special to help with the multiplayer experience.
Visuals
- Frame Rate: The frame rate is average, usually sitting at around 30fps. It’s really nothing to gripe about or praise since this is the norm for the RPG genre.
- Textures: I honestly tried for 10 hours to find something eye popping, but the textures were as generic as anything from five years ago. There’s never much variety in the environment; and sometimes the textures are so bad it’s hard to figure out what your looking at.
- Effects: This is really the only thing that redeems this visually. There are some pretty decent spell effects for such a cheaply made game. They possess the color that is so badly needed in the rest of your game play experience.
Sound
- Effects: In the podcast review I lambasted this part of the game as I felt it was the part that was the most lacking in quality. Nothing thumps, nothing really clangs, there isn’t any voice work in the dialogue, and the writing is so sophomoric that it’s hard to even justify the lack of voice work for some mediocre text to read on the screen. You probably can’t wait for me to talk about the interference of it all.
- Interference: This was, by and large, the WORST sounding game I have ever played. I kept telling a friend of mine over XBL that I was on the verge of vomiting as I kept hearing the same subsonic sound that passed for music drone on and on in the background. It had to be called the “pink note”. It bothered my guts to hear it. It probably won’t do that to anyone else, but after about five minutes of hoping the track will change, you will find out that it literally keeps that low tone going throughout most of the game (except for the action sequences where it uses an extremely limited variety of battle themes). I was so done with the sound at about an hour in I had to crank up the stereo to “wash” my ears. This seriously affected my decision on my rating of this game.
With that being said, this game rates far below average.
Our Thoughts:
by Justin Nauss:
Daggerdale is simply the worst game I’ve played in five years. It’s not just boring; it looks awful, it plays awful, and the sound makes me want to hurl. The worst thing is that I can’t make up the time I spent ten hours playing it when I could have had more fun combing the lint out of my carpet. To expand on why it makes me so upset, Daggerdale never rewards you much. It simply never gives you enough for your grind. Experience trickles by at a slothful rate while you wait more than half an hour to get a weapon upgrade. You never get very much money for your quests or your kills; and you seem to accumulate money much in the same way as you would by selling junk in Fallout 3. It’s honestly never rewarding enough to keep you coming back. The combat never makes you feel epic; and the animations feel wooden and lifeless. You never feel like a badass like you did in games like Lords of Shadow. You just feel like a dude who has a nervous twitch fighting of endless hordes of enemies that will not die with a coordinated combat moves. You have to beat the crap out of even menial enemies to slay them. Besides all that, the sound is atrocious! I’ve never played a game with such a menial soundtrack that made me so anxious, so irritated, and so ready to be done with it. I kept trying to play this with sound so I could hear the battle music to queue me up to what’s coming around the corner, but I seriously couldn’t take it anymore.
In closing, this is one of those buffalo chips of a game that promises something and completely loses itself where QA could have caught the majority of issues that made this such a lackluster game. Remove the bugs and the music, add a little voice acting, some variety, and a better sense of risk or grind/reward,; and this might have even garnished a slightly above average review. However, that will never be; and I will still add this to a list of games that was completely over-hyped and absolutely under-produced. Keep away, better Dungeons await you in Torchlight and Dungeon Siege. 
