- Offers fans of the action RPG the
ability to play cooperatively with up to four characters
- Well designed mechanics -- including the ability to zoom the
camera in and out, and a trigger that slows down the game's
action while you select spells or special attacks
- The game is almost overly
generous with improved weapons and armor scattered around the
levels, and has such a smooth ramp of progress and leveling up
that it generally requires less planning and strategy than other
action RPGs
- Character classes have very similar powers at higher levels,
sacrificing a little of the potential RPG feel of the game
Be
notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out
twice weekly.
Enter
E-Mail Address Below:
Dungeons & Dragons Heroes
Score: 7.2 / 10
In Dungeons & Dragons Heroes, you play a
fighter, wizard, rogue or cleric resurrected to do battle with an evil
mage threatening to take over your peaceful kingdom and its surrounding
planes of existence.
If you're a fan of action-based RPGs such as Baldur's Gate: Dark
Alliance and Diablo, you'll probably enjoy D&D Heroes -- Atari's new
title for the Xbox. It's got a solid plot with well designed levels, a
good score and beautifully rendered cut-scenes, and it brings enough new
features and tweaks to the table to avoid being labeled a copycat of
those earlier games. Most notably, it allows up to four characters to
play cooperatively, giving it an almost Gauntlet type feel with the
The game also allows you to zoom the camera in and out of the action --
a cool feature, particularly since the weapons, armor and enemies are
all well detailed. Unfortunately, the feature isn't very compatible with
co-op mode, as players tend to spread out quickly, but with RPGs being
one of the most girlfriend-unfriendly of the gaming
Advertisement
genres, I was only able to play in co-op mode for a single level early
in the game. Although I'm not yet a subscriber to XBOX Live, I was a bit
surprised that D&D Heroes didn't support the service, which would allow
players to hook up with more like-minded gamers.
The game begins with your chosen character's resurrection -- he or she
was once part of an elite group of heroes who vanquished an evil mage
named Kaedin, but were themselves unfortunately vanquished in the
process. Kaedin has since been resurrected by a group of evil clerics,
so you rise again to the challenge of defeating him. The key lies in
five gems, which unlock portals to different planes of existence,
consisting of several woodsy levels, fiery levels, icy levels, cemetery
levels and finally, a really cool evil castle level at the end. As you
can probably tell by my description, I was partial to Kaedin's evil
castle -- it's beautifully detailed and the action is much more
frenetic. I was especially impressed by the mind flayers, which, when
out of reach, attack you by telekinetically hurling treasure filled
boxes and barrels at you -- it both looks cool and saves you what, by
this point in any action RPG, has become the chore of smashing them
yourself.
All that said, for me, one of the greatest joys of RPGs is that they
open up new worlds where I can become mindlessly neurotic. When I played
Morrowind last summer, I laundered millions in gold through that talking
mudcrab and couldn’t rest until I had trained every stat up to 100 and
placed absurdly powerful enchantments on every item of clothing and
weaponry on my character.
The designers of D&D Heroes were faced with a formidable challenge in
making a multiplayer action RPG -- it's not all that fun to stop the
action every few minutes so that you or your buddies can flip through
menu screens swapping weapons, readying potions and the like. Of course,
those menus are still there along with another cool feature -- spells
and special attacks are assigned to buttons using the right trigger,
which slows down, but doesn't stop the action on the screen. But, the
net result of favoring action over character building is that the game
is balanced almost to a fault. You'll rarely feel an immediate need to
swap out weapons or armor after a good find, because the levels are so
evenly paced that almost none of the challenges seem insurmountable.
Leveling up happens at a pace almost ideally suited to the challenges
that lie immediately ahead. And, with "raise dead hero" amulets for sale
or available as treasure throughout most of the levels, there's rarely
any need to panic and run for the potions if your character gets caught
in an old-fashioned yuan-ti brawl.
Similarly, I played the game with every available character class
(wizard, cleric, rogue and fighter), and they don't feel all that
different. Each is very handy with their melee weapon from the outset,
and many of the special powers that you gain through leveling up are
similar for each class. Of course, the cleric's turn undead power can
make some levels particularly easy, and the rogue's lockpick ability
eliminates the need to worry about the door and treasure chest keys that
are abundantly scattered throughout each level. Still, when I think
wizard, I think of a character that must be gingerly handled until,
suddenly, around level 10, the gates of whoopass swing wide.
Diablo, already the grandfather of the top-down perspective action RPG,
was cool because it was, in many ways, a graphical version of NetHack --
the venerable ASCII title that allowed you, an @ sign, to explore
randomly generated dungeons of lines and dashes, fighting off both lower
and upper case letters. It required a lot of imagination, and took full
advantage of my neurotic character building tendencies. But, since
Diablo, action RPGs seem to have become more about the action and less
about the RPG -- that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a forced
compromise between depth and intensity.
Still, it's a fun title that gives the genre some notable tweaks, and
it's certainly recommendable to anyone with an itch for a fast and
furious dungeon crawl.
