Xbox has a relatively new thing that I first noticed around a month ago where you can request keys for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. This is an ideal situation; downloading a title from the service is much easier than relying on unpredictable middlemen whose troves of review keys are locked down tight for no obvious reason, but I’ve struggled to justify continuing to spend money on the subscription as a reviewer since I’ll always end up being called away to cover other games for long stretches. Thanks to Xbox Game Studios (who are the ones who approved the key), I’ll have access to that library over the next few months.
As is sometimes the case, a message arrived with the subscription that suggested covering a newer addition to the service. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a game that I had put a key request in for a while back and heard nothing back about, so I was able to cancel that request and just download it thanks to Game Pass. Again, much easier. Unfortunately, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is weirdly mediocre.
I’ll admit to having forgone a lot of the usual due diligence when I first heard about it, assuming that my positive experiences with past D&D titles (specifically, my deep love of the Chronicles of Mystara beat-em-ups and Infinity Engine games) meant that the Dungeons & Dragons license carried a certain amount of quality control with it. I mean, this game’s title is clearly meant to draw a parallel to the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance aRPGs, which I remember being good. How bad could Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance be?
Oh. Oh my.
Needless to say, my very first impressions weren’t positive. When selecting from Dark Alliance‘s four characters, I decided to use archer Catti-Brie. Now, I may not have a ton of experience with Dungeons & Dragons outside of the realm of video games, but I recognized Drizzt as an important character, which means that the other three playable characters are likely to be similarly important to the setting, history, and franchise. Still, every time I read “Catti-Brie,” my brain automatically translates it to “spiteful cheese.”
And if that’s the kind of comment that deeply wounds your love of the setting and characters, then Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is unequivocally not the game for you. There’s practically no story here; there’s a little something about a magical shard and a doofus who tried to use it for conquest, only to fail and lose it, but that gives way for various cutscenes of evil grunts doing virtually nothing. Various low-tier baddies want the shard for their own nefarious purposes, so it’s up to you to murder them first.
Everything about the mechanics in Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance feels wrong. The animations are clunky and buggy (expect to see a lot of dead bodies levitating slowly across the ground) to the point where I can’t even tell if enemies are supposed to shoot into the sky when defeated. The camera places your character in the first third of the screen, which is great from a photo/video compositional standpoint but terrible from an actually-seeing-things standpoint. The worst thing of all, though, is how Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is constantly eating my button inputs. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gone to nock an arrow and charge up an attack, only to have nothing happen when I release the trigger.
The AI in this game makes no sense. You can find a high point, and, assuming that no invisible walls are between you and your opponent, take them out one by one while they carry on a conversation, oblivious to the rain of arrows. There’s a proximity effect that reduces your damage from far distances, but sometimes it’s less annoying to shoot each enemy 100 times than to jump down and watch as enemies appear (sometimes from thin air) all around you. That’s not an ideal situation for an archer, obviously.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance‘s difficulty is all over the place. Some bosses have multiple phases, others are straightforward and can be defeated in seconds, and several of them don’t even bother attacking until you’ve walked into the arena a certain distance. If you remain in place instead, you can freely shoot them in the face and clear the fight without taking a single attack. Sometimes, later bosses are so significantly easier than earlier ones that it feels like a bug. There’s no rhyme or reason to the difficulty.
And it’s the multiplayer’s fault. Make no mistake: Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a multiplayer game. You can play it solo, which is always my preference, but you’ll still be subjected to countdowns at the beginning and end of maps (which I’ve only ever seen in live service games like Marvel’s Avengers). The end of every map will waste time ranking you first among your nonexistent fellow players. And I can only imagine that the difficulty curve was designed to accommodate a four-character party while the job of balancing the single-player difficulty was outsourced to an intern with a random number generator.
The most frustrating thing about Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, though? It isn’t abysmal. Truly awful games can be somewhat redeeming by firing you up. Some of my favorite work has involved railing against various games. I even came up with the idea of “progress logs” back in 2017 as a way of tracking the many, many deficiencies of Valkyria Revolution (while also hitting on a bunch of keywords for search engines). Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance isn’t substantive enough to hate like that. It’s an empty box, the game equivalent of the green code that scrolls down the screen in The Matrix. It’s a set of locales and wonky physics vaguely fashioned into the form of a game like some kind of video game homunculus.
And I’m going to try and play through it all. Not because I have to, but because I feel a strange desire to document this thing-that-shouldn’t-exist in a review. It shouldn’t take too long; setting aside the rare checkpoints that require you to defeat enemies, most of your opponents can be ignored. You can literally run past entire groups of them. That’s one positive in Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance‘s favor.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance impressions (Xbox Game Pass) first appeared on Killa Penguin
