Billy O'Keefe reviews the downloadable game of the week — Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale.
Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale
For: Xbox 360 (via Xbox Live Arcade), PlayStation 3 (via PlayStation Network), Windows PC
From: Bedlam Games/Atari
Rating: Teen (blood, violence)
Price: $US15
Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale won't win any honourable mentions, much less awards, for breaking ground.
If you've played a dungeon crawler, the vast bulk of what you'll experience here - the quest structure, the threadbare story, the endless array of grunt enemies and barrels that await your weapon - will look familiar to a distressing degree.
Daggerdale competently covers the basics, with multiple character classes, collectable loot, a useful array of spells and a character-levelling system that upgrades the usual attributes all present and accounted for.
It also, unlike the vastly overrated Torchlight, can challenge players by swarming them with enemies who are actually somewhat formidable.
On the ingenuity scale, though, Daggerdale stands totally pat, happy to embrace the same uninspired environments, gameplay standards and quest design flaws (prepare for a lot of backtracking) that have made dungeon crawlers the most complacent genre in existence.
The inclusion of online co-op' (four players) is nice when it works, but the aggravations - interface discrepancies and glitches, a lobby that makes it guesswork to team up with similar-level players, tolerable instances of lag and the bizarre tendency to whisk you to a load screen while the action continues for your partners and you get pummeled with no recourse - dampen the occasion.
If you absolutely need some dungeon crawling and can forgive the complete lack of inspiration, the offline co-op' (two players) is, at least for now, the best way to play.
