Co-op action games, like brawlers or action RPGs, make for some of the best gaming experiences I have had. Whether playing with one other person or three, co-op gaming can traverse places that single player gaming cannot. One of my favorite titles in this genre would be D&D Heroes, a relic from the original Xbox. Fast forward to present day, and we have a new four player Dungeons & Dragons co-op game: D&D Dark Alliance.
I went into D&D Dark Alliance (DA) with cautious optimism, but during my bouts of frustration I had to remember a few things: this is a $40 game, the developer (Tuque Games) has only one other (mediocre) game in their portfolio that came out five years ago, and patching and co-op’ing can do absolute wonders for a game that is otherwise rough. DA touches on all of these thoughts.
This is a game that is clearly meant to be played with up to three other players, and that’s great! However, one problem right out of the gates is that only online play is supported here, meaning zero support for couch co-op and all of the benefits it inherently offers. I have read that a future update for the Xbox version is apparently going to enable split screen play, whether that be two or four players I’m not sure, but hopefully this is a feature that comes out very soon in a patch for all platforms. Even just support for a second player (if not a third or fourth, for whatever reason) in split screen would be great. And even though the game is marketed as being next-gen (although it doesn’t really look or feel like it), I have to believe that a PS5 or XSX could very easily handle the workload of split screen, so that shouldn’t be an excuse for not doing it. Anyway, as is, I have spent the majority of my playtime with DA in single player. While it’s pretty good in some respects, I couldn’t escape the fact that my time with the game would be leaps and bounds more enjoyable with couch co-op play — so hopefully that arrives, but I digress.
The game as it plays now is serviceable, but there are a host of technical issues in front of you. The most egregious of these in my experience has been the braindead AI whose awareness does a lot to stunt the immersion that the graphics, sounds, soundtrack, and voiceovers otherwise do a pretty good job at achieving. Enemy behavior is strange, yes even for goblins, in that they seem to have hard boundaries that they can be active in, and can’t pass said boundaries. They also don’t ‘wake up’ to your presence at times, and are sometimes oblivious to your ranged attacks, even though you’re chipping away at their health. The AI is cringe-worthy, and something the devs are surely working to address. Other issues include some broken graphical elements, like objects that should be gone but aren’t, or items that should be visible but aren’t yet are still in the gameworld, as well as flaky enemy lock-on. Fortunately — these are very patchable issues.
Now, anyone that has played the old Dark Alliances, Gauntlet games, or Dungeon Siege games, knows that loot is a big part of the fun. Going through, fighting waves of enemies, finding offbeat paths, and discovering awesome items is pretty thrilling. And hey, you’ll get that here with DA — there paths less taken that take some figuring out to get to, but players are rewarded for doing so, and there are a lot of fun waves of enemies. However, one curious design choice has players holding onto all of their loot during the course of a mission before you can see what you even got. In other words, you’ll get loot, but you can only tell what class of item it is, not even what it is — and you certainly can’t actually equip said loot until you finish the current mission and are in the lobby area to, presumably, start the next mission. I didn’t like the idea of having to go into a mission with a preset loadout, and not having the option to switch out gear in the middle of the action. Having to instead visit the loot area of the lobby and go through animations of opening chests made this feel like one of those loot-hording mobile games, and I think DA should distinguish itself from that.
This lobby area is pretty neat in as far as it will give players a way to look at previous bosses beaten, practice their moves, shop, look at the world map to pick another mission, etc. I also liked how on PS5 players go from navigating the main menu to seamlessly going right into this lobby; it’s well done. Once you select which of the four characters you want to use, and select your loadout and mission, you choose your difficulty level, and there are several of these to choose from. For several hours, I was staying in the lowest end of the difficulty because, well, the game is actually really hard if you’re playing solo until you get some good loot and some leveling done. During the course of a mission, you can light campfires at certain points that act as checkpoints, but doing so has the Souls-like penalty of respawning all previously defeated enemies. If you take the risk of not checkpointing, your rewards increase, but obviously the risk of having to restart the entire mission carries a risk (and a big one for me, as I was not too keen on retreading ground).
Ultimately, DA is one of those games that just about goes tit-for-tat on pros and cons. With some patching, this game could really break through to another level of quality, but we’ll have to see what develops in that regard. I understand that Tuque has several things lined up for the next six months. They’re planning on new free DLC and a new expansion, Echoes of the Blood War, and that’s cool. However, I think they really need to take a hard look at the base game and make several major adjustments to it before worrying about DLC, because if the base game doesn’t get right, there might not be much of an audience to bring back in with DLC and expansions.
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