Dungeons And Dragons Tactics

[Gabriel]

Remember the days of gaining enough XP to level up, returning to town, visiting the trainer, performing the level up procedure, only to find you crapped out on your roll for Hit Points? Then you'd reload your game and do it all over again, and again, and again, until you finally got a virtual roll of the die high enough to be acceptable. After that, you'd save the game and repeat the process with the next character. Fond memories of tedium, eh?

 

Well, those days are back! Dungeons and Dragons Tactics is here! The designers seem to have helpfully skewed the random number generator towards low numbers on the die. This was doubtless to extend the play value of the game as players spend hours and hours loading and reloading their saves so their fighters don't end up with minimum hit points.

 

That's not all. The menus of the game are among some of the most awkward ever. Let's take the basic task of inventory management. To trade an item, you must use the shoulder buttons to select the proper character on the left side of the screen. Once selected, you use the D-Pad to move up and down and select the item you want to trade. To select that item, you press right on the D-Pad. After that, you must use the analog pad to move to the right side of the screen, and again use the shoulder buttons to select the character to trade with. Once you do that, you can again use the D-Pad to scroll through their inventory and push right to select their item. Once you've done all that, you can press X to prompt the game to ask you if you really want to conduct this trade.

 

Oh, you can also look at descriptions of items. All descriptions are long and scrolled up and down (overly fast) with the analog nub. Don't press left or right though, because you'll skip to another character and not be looking at the right item description anymore. To top it off, the descriptions all start with long winded flavor text and the actual game information is at the very bottom of the description, which is, of course, off screen thus forcing you to have to scroll.

 

Doing just about anything in the game is a chore. Creating characters takes forever and requires navigating almost a dozen screens, and you need to do that 6 times if you want to make a party. Just to add a little more complication, text entry is handled by the default PSP celphone method as opposed to the game providing it's own, easier text entry procedure.

 

There are some concessions to a little thing gamers in the real world (ie, not D&D players) would call pick up and play. You can use Quick Start to get playing without creating an entire party. Interestingly, the entire quick-start party is evil, although this seems to have no initial bearing on the game. There's also an auto-level up feature to spare a newbie the task of figuring out what out of a few dozen feats to pick or how to distribute skill points among the numerous ill-defined skill options. It works well enough until you're 4th level and realize the game has been giving you minimum hit points every time, and effectively selecting your skills at random. Then you have to restart from scratch.

 

If you're a D&D player, you will need to haul out your D&D 3.5 Player's Handbook. If you're not a D&D player, you will need to buy the strategy guide (assuming there is one).

 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to spend the next few hours reloading in order to get more than minimum hit points for my fighter.

Edited August 21, 2007 by Gabriel

[MCHufnagel]

Ha Ha, I never played a D & D video game, but I have played the P & P board versions. Fun times, NOT! Even I'm not that big a geek (well, not anymore).

 

Thanks for the review. My son and I were looking over some PSP games just last night and we saw this. He's been thinking about getting a PSP because the library is looking pretty good right now. Looks like we'll take a pass on this.

[Gabriel]

Ha Ha, I never played a D & D video game, but I have played the P & P board versions. Fun times, NOT! Even I'm not that big a geek (well, not anymore).

 

Thanks for the review. My son and I were looking over some PSP games just last night and we saw this. He's been thinking about getting a PSP because the library is looking pretty good right now. Looks like we'll take a pass on this.

 

I hate to say this, but I think you made the right choice. I definitely feel there's a damn good game here, but it's buried under a layer of obscurity and a frustrating interface. The past few years have been very good to the tactical RPG genre, and there are many other games which are much more accessible than this title.

 

The scariest thing is that I am a card carrying pen and paper RPG geek. My RPG book collection is almost as big as my videogame collection. I've even written my own games. I'm not a die hard D&D 3.5 player, but I'm familiar enough to get by. And I STILL had to haul my Player's Handbook out of storage to figure out what the hell to do in this game.

 

It needs a sticker on it, "For total game grognards only."

[cimerians]

Im an old school 1st edition grognard and I picked this game up as well. (I kind of like 3rd edition).

I completely agree with your review and also agree there is a good game here.

 

btw - wotc just announced 4th edition. The "video game version".

[Gabriel]

btw - wotc just announced 4th edition. The "video game version".

 

I noticed that news. There's really no telling what WotC really plans to do with the game.