Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance tries so hard to be a game for everyone that it ends up being a game that virtually no one will be able to appreciate. Its design is riddled with flaws ranging from minor to game-breakingly severe. Its characters have all the personality of a wax sculpture. Solo play is possible, but inadvisable thanks to the constant multiplayer-centric countdowns and balance issues that can see you instantly killed in a single enemy attack just one map after breezing through a boss. And while multiplayer is clearly designed to be Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance‘s main draw, I can’t imagine what kind of awful person it would take to subject one’s friends to such a meaningless game of terrible camera angles, hit detection, and gameplay gimmicks. The single positive thing Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance does is end, though sadly, not nearly soon enough.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance may have damaged my appreciation for the setting
Full disclosure: I’ve never played a pen and paper RPG in my life, so my experiences with Dungeons & Dragons have been entirely in video game form. The first of those experiences would be the Baldur’s Gate games, with Shadows of Amn being a particular highlight of my early PC gaming days. Then there’s the inimitable Planescape: Torment, which I’ve replayed many times. I even came to love Chronicles of Mystara, the PC port of the Dungeons & Dragons arcade beat-em-ups. These are games that I tend to bring up a lot; by providing polished, deceptively deep gameplay and stories that range from passable to truly profound, games in the Dungeons & Dragons universe have built up a lot of goodwill toward the setting.
Finishing Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was like waking up from a dream; after slogging through this game’s lazy attempt at storytelling, I was finally forced to recognize the deficiencies of the setting when writers don’t put in the effort to keep things interesting.
Throwing various fantasy creatures at you in waves isn’t inherently interesting, and using them as monster-of-the-week villains whose schemes crumble after three relatively short combat maps means that none of them are afforded the opportunity to pose any kind of threat.
You’re playing as characters important to the lore like Drizzt (and I’m operating under the assumption that the other three playable characters are similarly important), but they don’t really do anything but run around murdering creatures who are mostly minding their own business. There’s some nonsense about an evil shard that seems to come up whenever Icewind Dale is the focus of the story, but it’s just a MacGuffin that all of the villains pursue regardless of how little sense desiring it makes. When a dragon at the end of the story was swearing revenge for the death of her mate, only to segue into “and then the shard will be mine,” I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle at the narrative weight falling on its face.
I suppose that long-time fans can look at the bios and enemy descriptions and bask in the warm glow of familiarity (assuming that all of the information is accurate). These are admittedly much more interesting than any of the writing or events in the actual game. It reminds me of that old writing advice that asks you to consider whether you’re writing the most interesting part of your main character’s life. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance ends up coming across like one of early Disney’s direct-to-video sequels that never hold a candle to the much better original stories.
The gameplay is a crime against humanity, common sense, and the purpose of buttons
The best way of describing Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is “like Marvel’s Avengers but with no microtransactions, and buttons only work about 70% of the time.” Everything about this game screams “live service,” so it was genuinely disorienting to discover that there are no microtransactions. Given how clunky and buggy everything is, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if the game was originally designed around microtransactions, only for the developers to abandon the model when they couldn’t properly implement them. That might explain why the game’s Game Pass store page lists the presence of in-app purchases, only for the bottom to specify that they’re free. So… not an in-app purchase at all, then. Sure. Fine. Okay.
I tend to gravitate toward archers, so I played as the archer Catti-brie. This was both a good and terrible decision because while it allowed me to avoid a lot of wonky hit detection by engaging enemies from afar, it also meant that I spent most of the game holding the left trigger like a vice until my hand cramped (because anything less than 100% pressure deactivates your aiming view) and failing to nock arrows because the heavy attack only worked around 7 out of every 10 button presses.
I even remapped the controls halfway through the game so that heavy attack was mapped to the Y button. The game continuously failed to draw an arrow regardless of whether I was using the face or shoulder buttons. I suspect that this has something to do with Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance‘s outrageously slow button-registering. For example, the menu button does different things when you’re at your base depending on whether you press or hold it, so opening the menu to spend skill points or change your equipment has an odd delay of ~1½ seconds before it appears. Another example is the loot reward chest. If you reveal each piece of gear one at a time, I found that pressing down to move to a new piece of gear only worked around 40% of the time. Holding Y to reveal them all made scrolling through loot much more reliable.
The conclusion here is pretty obvious. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance eats your button inputs all the time. I played at 1920x1080 and the frame rate was locked to 60 FPS, so this isn’t a frame rate issue. The game is just designed in such a poor way that you can’t press a button and count on it registering properly. I’m sure that this has happened before, but it’s such a rare example of sloppy coding that I can’t think of another example.
Bosses, invincibility, and the fun-destroying quality of nothing working in a sane way
Catti-brie began a level that culminates in a fight against a Beholder by remarking about how epic the encounter would be. I had my doubts; beholders are one of those fights that games have never known how to handle, so they tend to become gimmicky and awful. The first arcade game, for example, spammed you with status effects that could only be counteracted through stick-wiggling QTEs. I was willing to keep an open mind, though—up until this point, I hadn’t encountered a single boss who was truly difficult, with the worst of them merely being annoying. I’m talking about them doing things like spamming enemies who appear behind you, or enemies who teleport around/phase into existence without warning.
And when I realized how truly terrible those mechanics would be if I attempted levels on anything other than the first tier of difficulty (which is selected per-mission and affects the amount of experience and quality of loot you receive), I resolved to play through the game on the equivalent of easy mode. Otherwise, I’d be stuck dodging around for 10 minutes, shaving tiny chips off of bosses’ giant health bars in the rare cases where they didn’t allow me to kill them.
The developers of Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance must have realized that bosses sometimes refuse to engage you until you move closer to them because they added invincibility periods to the last couple of bosses. That includes the beholder fight. I began the fight by bombarding it with arrows, using my “ultimate attack” built up over the course of the preceding level to take out huge chunks of its health. Then it entered an invincibility period and I realized that it hadn’t attacked once. The boss was frozen and invincible. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance saves before boss fights, so I resolved to kill myself by jumping into the pits around the arena, but after several falls, I stopped taking damage for no obvious reason. Then the only option was to quit back to the hub area (forfeiting my loot and exp) and replay the whole level.
The beholder fight worked on subsequent attempts, but do note that I’m using “worked” in a very loose sense. Nothing about this fight makes sense. For one thing, it teleports around, often spawning on top of you. Dodging is imprecise and you’re just as likely to leap into a pit as successfully evade damage. The beholder can become invincible at any time and will tend to do so the second you trigger your ultimate attack. Worst of all, however, is that it has an instant-kill move with a fuzzy, unclear hitbox that can wipe you out in a single attack. Again, this is the easiest difficulty.
The final boss also turns invincible. Invincibility is a horrible gimmick that destroys your ability to damage late-game opponents faster than Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance wants you to beat them, and while that’s not the worst of the game’s mistakes, it’s a representative example of where its priorities lie. The developers wanted Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance to be epic rather than fun, so they stripped out the fun and made everything a chore. Case in point: most missions require finding or triggering four random objects to proceed. Uninstalling this is more fun than playing it.
No surprise—Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance has orchestral fluff and dated visuals
This is Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, a game that was released in 2021. This is The Dark Eye: Demonicon, a game that was released in 2013 and was ugly even for its time. In what universe is it acceptable for these two games to look alike? Look—I don’t need photorealistic graphics. It’s insane to me how little work was put into making this fantasy world look like its own space, though. The cutscenes are produced well, and the loading screen art is some of the best I’ve seen since King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame, but everything in-game looks washed out and generic. Areas come in two basic types: orange-tinted places and blue-tinted places. Worst of all, though, is how locking on to an enemy or entering Catti-brie’s aiming mode zooms in so far that you’re blinded to everything around you. That’s not great in a game that loves teleporting enemies behind you.
Generic, bombastic orchestral is the go-to soundtrack for those with a creative vision that begins and ends at “epic.” There’s expressive orchestral music like in Baldur’s Gate 2 and several other such games, of course, but the music in Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance isn’t one of those rare exceptions. I’m convinced that no one is actually composing music for games like this. Game engines must have a field where you enter tags that describe your game (like multiplayer, fantasy, epic) and it automatically recognizes what you’re doing and auto-populates it with an orchestra, drums, some chanting, and a lot of reverb. I don’t like it. I don’t respect it. And I’m tired of hearing it in every also-ran fantasy game. Take. A. Damn. Risk.
Story: 1/3 Gameplay: 0.5/3 Visuals: 0.5/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ – 3/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean
*An Xbox Game Pass Ultimate key was provided, and I used that Game Pass subscription for this Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance review. The game supposedly took me around 10 hours to beat.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance review – Senseless design first appeared on Killa Penguin
