So a few days back I gave my impressions on Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. At first I thought it was pretty fun and the instanced zones gave me a similar feeling to when I used to play Phantasy Star Online 1 and 2. After playing through the game and seeing what it’s got to offer, I have to say that it’s got a great concept but the combat is really flawed, and there’s some really crappy bugs, and it kneecaps what would otherwise be a really, really fun game. Also the few times I was able to find a multiplayer match I got paired up with imbeciles, but more on that later.

Dark Alliance takes place in the world of Icewind Dale. The characters are from the series The Legend of Drizzt, written by fantasy author RA Salvatore. Now in all transparency, I am only familiar with either of these series in passing. I never played Icewind Dale, and I’ve never read RA Salvatore. Ironically as a youngster I worked in retail stores that sold both the game and books, respectively, but that’s about it. Heard tons of great things, too, but I just never made it a priority to check them out. But I do like beating the shit out of bad guys, so that’s why I was interested in this game at all.

So the story goes that the heroes of our story, Catti-Brie, Wulfgar, Bruenor, and Drizzt, have just defeated the mage Akar Kessel and Chrenshinibon – and if that last name makes you hungry for sugar breakfast treats then you and I are kindred spirits – it’s a race against time and other threats to find the Crystal Shard, an artifact of great power. That’s a super condensed version and I’m sure those who read The Crystal Shard have a ton more to add. But this gets you in the door and now you’ve got everybody’s motivation – it’s a magical macguffin that allows you to do macguffin-y things.

Honestly from what I read of the story in the cutscenes, it’s pretty interesting and I dug the characters. The cutscenes look great, even if they’re pretty choppy at times. I played this on a 4k TV the colors could really pop on it. The backgrounds and environments you explore look great as well, though there’s not any major variety in areas. Lots of snowy mountains, caves, things like that. The characters themselves are a mixed bag to me. They have detailed enough armor and equipment, but in my opinion their faces don’t have quite as much detail as the the environmeents they’re in. It’d be like taking the characters from grand theft auto 4 and putting them in grand theft auto 5 without an upgrade. And it didn’t break my immersion in the game, it’s just a design choice that I thought was odd.

The music is suitably epic, but I found the dialogue was pretty strong and surprisingly funny. There’s a lot of banter between enemies while you’re exploring, so if you’re coming up on a group of goblins or something else, it’s fun to listen to what they have to say. There’s also banter between your party members in multiplayer and that gave the game a lot of personality.

So, if there’s anything that does break the immersion here, it’s the gameplay itself, which I regret to say is much worse than my initial impressions and really spoiled my enjoyment of the game. For starters, I spent the majority of the game as Catti Brie, who’s an archer. I did play a few levels with each of the other characters and they do play differently enough from each other that everybody will find someone to suit their playstyle, however there is no mage archetype in this. That character’s coming later as DLC.

Personally I think that’s a bad idea because as it stands there’s only one ranged character. The other characters can each do a ranged attack, but it’s almost totally ineffective and is more meant to hit distant targets to collect crystals used for upgrading equipment. Catti is the exception and because she’s ranged, she can kill almost any target without even engaging them in a fight – again, more on that later.

So going down the roster we’ve got Wulfgar who’s supposed to be your basic warrior. He fights with a war hammer and honestly he felt a lot slower than the actual tank in the game, Bruenor. He does have some hard hitting attacks, but if you think you can just mindlessly swipe at enemies and clear them out then you’ve got another thing coming. I got my ass kicked in as him more than any other character.

When the game’s combat isn’t making my anger rise, it was boring the hell out of me.

Next up is Drizzt, the character that everybody will know from the books. He dual wields swords and is an assassin, so he can stealth and getting behind enemies for backstabs nets you some sexy critical damage. He’s quick and has a low health pool so staying on your feet is key with him, and I found that if you snuck in behind an enemy, it was pretty common to be able to stunlock them until they were dead. Not sure if that was intentional but it’s a thing.

After that we’ve got the tank Bruenor, who for a dwarf could haul his little stout ass across a battle really quickly, and his axe was reasonably fast. He’s got some decent attacks but his high defense and ability to taunt are some of his greater assets in a party.

Lastly is Catti Brie. I normally choose melee characters in these games but wanted to go outside my comfort zone and try a ranged, and it turned out that I had more fun playing with her than any of the others. She’s got great survivability due to having a heal ability and can resurrect her party later on. In single player she can murder everything from far away or from above ground because the AI of 95% of the enemies is running on lobotomy-level intelligence and doesn’t know when they’re taking damage.

Unfortunately for Catti, her greatest threat is input lag. It was VERY common for me to hit the trigger to fire off an arrow and it not register, or not charge up a shot, and that lead me to dying or coming close a lot more than I expected. I fought the controls more than I did anything else, but then again most of these enemies didn’t fight back. Not even bosses. Most of the footage you’ll see for this review is of me firing off shots at enemies that are just staring at me blankly, as if they just graduated from college and I told them their performing arts or gender studies degree was totally worthless. It was tons of button mashing the triggers to get her to fire or charge arrows and the times where it didn’t work, it would look like I was just aiming my bow and just not doing anything, but I promise that I was trying.

Regardless of the characters, targeting in this game sucks out loud and causes you more problems than anything else. Trying to combo your special moves into the enemy of your choice usually misses them completely, so more often than not you’ll just decide to rely on your basic and heavy attacks to hurt enemies. The answer to this is lock-on targeting, right? Well unfortunately, that’s broken, too. See, locking onto your enemy will tighten the camera up behind your shoulder, so that you basically can’t see what’s going on to the sides or behind. There’s arrows on the ground so you can see the locations of enemies, and those change colors when there’s an attack coming, but guess what you also can’t see when you’re locked on? Yep, the arrows. Also a major irritation to me is that with all these camera issues, they could’ve at least solved most of them by adding a 180 degree turn move, but that’s not here either, so you have to constantly tilt the right analog to be able to see all around you. I had to raise the speed of the camera in the options to make up for it but it still didn’t help all that much.

I think the worst part of the combat, and something that needs to be corrected first is the stamina gauge. Basically everything you do uses stamina. That’s normal in games. The thing that sucks more dick than Dante Hicks’ girlfriend Veronica is that almost everything that uses stamina, also reduces the max stamina gauge, especially special moves that you unlock. So basically you’re penalized for using special moves. You have very limited ways of getting it back as well. In addition to potions, you can parry attacks, get stamina crystals as drops, set up a camp at checkpoints or activate your super-duper-ultimate attack. None of those things are frequent. So if you’re in a boss fight and you’re trying to, you know, contribute to the team and inflict meaningful damage, then in just a few seconds you’ll see your stamina gauge drop to its minimum of 50%. It sucks all the fun out of combat and is a cheap, lazy way to try and force resource management on players.

So enemies, as I said, don’t do much of anything. You fight your standard variety of goblins, ogres, trolls, some angry dwarves, stuff like that. If you’re Catti Brie, most of these idiots won’t notice you, even after you’ve killed all their friends that were just standing next to them. Hell, even after you’ve decided to spice things up and engage them all at once, there’s a lot of times where they’ll still just stand there and look at you, or they’ll walk toward you and not attack. Even bosses. It’s like the developers forgot to program them to do something. Other times if you back away enough they’ll totally disengage and go back to where they were, kind of like if you’ve played an online RPG and you run away from them enough that they immediately stop and go back to their spot.

When the game’s combat isn’t making my anger rise, it was boring the hell out of me. There’s not a lot of variety in enemies and the bosses are really disappointing. Most of them are just more powerful versions of the same enemies you normally fight, and you won’t fight large enemies until you’ve cleared all the “mission” story arcs and moved onto what the game considers “dungeons”. That’s where you’ll fight some giant enemies, the beholder, and the dragon Icewind. Before that though, you’ll feel like you’re killing the same things repeatedly.

When you’re not fighting, you’re back at the hub. From here you can go to the rewards chest and get all the phat loots you just got from levels you’ve finished, and you can use gold and crystals at the merchant to upgrade your gear and consumables, and you can also change the skins of what you’re wearing if matching is your thing. Right now there’s just a merchant and a spot for viewing trophies of bosses you’ve killed, and there’s a spot for blacksmith whom I’m assuming is coming with the DLC or maybe he’s stuck in traffic. Or hungover. Happens to the best of us. From here you can go to your character’s menu and allocate stat points, purchase special passive and active abilities with Feat points, and also spend gold to buy various attack moves that as I mentioned, wear down your stamina hella fast and make you worthless in battle because this game hates you.

If you’re done with all that then you can hop onto multiplayer, which has options galore! You can either start a party, or join one. That’s it. Playing in a party means your only way to communicate is to use voice chat, something that in 2021 we’ve all decided is about as good an idea as eating at a Chinese buffet without being within running distance of a bathroom, or while wearing a diaper.

I had a very hard time finding a group to play with and of the times I tried, I either got bored waiting, was kicked from a party I’d get into, but then I found 2 groups – 2 – that played a whole level. These people, children, barn animals, whatever they were – they both ran the exact same mission, at the same difficulty which was way too high for our party, and they both wanted to speedrun the whole thing. Both times resulted in the whole party wiping because nobody wanted to cooperate. I can honestly say that if you play with friends who want to actually communicate and work together, multiplayer could be really fun. Like it could save this game, even with all the other flaws I mentioned. But if you play with some random R-TARDS online, you’re rolling the dice – no pun intended.

Last thing I want to talk about are the bugs. They range from minor ones, like health bars on enemies randomly disappearing, so major ones, like not being able to progress through a level. One instance here, I finished a boss fight and it did not trigger the level to end. I ran around, tried shooting at things, nothing. So I had to quit the level and go back to the hub. You know what happens when you do that before finishing a level? That’s right, you get nothing. So that was around a half hour or 40 minutes I don’t get back. Other weirdness was exploring some nooks and crannies to get treasure chests and the geometry of the level not letting me back out, and also the usual weird clipping bugs where enemies stick halfway out of floors and walls and go into spasms when you kill them. But at least those are funny.

So at the end of the day, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a good looking game with a great concept with an interesting story, but a really disappointing missed opportunity because you can see the potential just SCREAMING to make its way out of the bugs and the crappy stamina system and braindead enemies and unresponsive controls. The good news is that I think a lot of this stuff could be patched up. I don’t know if they’ll do it, but if so then I can see myself coming back to this game. Ultimately games like this live and die on future content in addition to not having the problems I just mentioned, and honestly I’ll be interested to see what this is like a few months from now and see what’s improved and what hasn’t.