Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II review (Xbox)

Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II has finally hobbled onto a store shelves, after many believed that it would never make it, but despite the legal wrangling that went on around it, it’s finally here. But was it worth the wait? Why am I asking you? I’m going to tell you that it very much is.

Dark Alliance II picks up where the first one left off. Not only in that its story follows on from the first, but it carries the interface and gameplay from the first one and fine tunes the parts of it that were left wanting. An evil vampire hellbent on the destruction of Baldur’s Gate captures the three heroes of Dark Alliance, after they emerged victorious in the first game. New heroes headed for Baldur’s Gate, looking for adventure, run afoul of the evil vampire’s schemes and ultimately bring him to justice (with suitable space left for a sequel, although the chances of us seeing it are left up to fate itself…don’t hold your breath).

The certainly are characters…

The sequel offers a wider choice of characters than the first and each plays slightly differently. There’s a womanising barbarian warrior, who deals out damage with a carefree laugh and is capable of wielding two handed weapons in one hand; a dark elf monk that is equally adept with her fists and a staff; a necromancer that uses his arts to summon skeletons and steal the life of his foes; a gold loving dwarven rogue that uses his crossbow to deadly effect, steal from his foes and disarm traps and a pious cleric who can cast some handy spells both on herself and others.

Each of these characters is sufficiently different to the other to make it worthwhile trying them all out. They all also have one or two tailor made quests, making the game slightly different when playing through with a different character. Dialogue is slightly tailored for them to, so the cleric is always being goody-goody and the barbarian is always being smarmy. It’s a nice touch and unexpected in a game of this apparent simplicity.

Getting to grips with Baldur’s Gate

The interface is fairly intuitive, with buttons for jumping, hitting, casting spells and drinking potions all on the face of the controller and with a rather brilliant improvement in that pulling the left trigger brings up a shortcut menu that allows you to have another four powers readily accessible in addition to the one that is assigned to the spell button. This is a great improvement over the first Dark Alliance game that had you scrolling up and down through your powers in the middle of a fight.

These powers look great, as do most of the graphics in the game. Perhaps because the developers were developing the game simultaneously for all three consoles, instead of porting from the PS2, the game features much better textures and crisper graphics than the first. The character and monster models are all large and well detailed, with fantastic death animations. It’s very easy to keep track of the action, although you may have to rotate the camera to suit from time to time.

The spells and special effects on the weapons all look fantastic, with lightning and fire flashing around as your strike your enemies down. The water effects were a standout in the first game and here they look even lovelier and are featured in abundance throughout the game. It seems every level has bit of liquid to splosh through.

It mostly runs at a solid frame rate, although when dual-wielding fire and lightning swords and playing in co-op with the cleric blasting spells all over, there is some evidence of slowdown.

The sound also makes Dark Alliance II shine. The music is very good and suits the tone of the game perfectly. The sound effects are also excellent with meaty blasts from your spells and grunts and crashes from the combat.

Why do we fight? It’s about the man next to you

The co-operative play is of course the stand out feature, as although it is fun to play Dark Alliance II on your own, it pales in comparison to having a friend play alongside you. Each of the five characters compliment another in ways that make for good replay value as you try them all out.

It’s worth mentioning that the game is not particularly long or all that difficult really. Expect to blast through it quite quickly. You would think that would make the game shallow, but that’s where you would (mostly) be wrong. Because of course this is a Dungeons & Dragons game, and there are stats to fiddle with.

God bless D&D…or not if you are to believe the parents that tried to brand us all Satanists many years ago when I played it at school. One wonders if parents even know that the fine action game that little Timmy is playing is hiding D&D under the hood. Because somewhere under all the running and hitting and jumping and blasting with spells, little virtual dice are being rolled and top-secret calculations are taking place. How does this affect you the game player? It doesn’t for the most part, you could probably randomly select stats and skills as your character advances and it wouldn’t really stop you from being able to easily defeat the game. But that would ruin half the fun. It’s the customisation of your characters and weapons that adds unexpected depth to what is admittedly a pretty repetitive, but fun, exercise.

Other D&D offerings

Since this is the Xbox release of Dark Alliance II we are reviewing here, we are going to draw inevitable comparisons with the recently released Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes. Both are essentially the same game, with different inconsequential stories. Although Dark Alliance II is a better game and a far more polished product, both in terms of presentation and gameplay, you have to wonder why the developers chose to only support two players. This one small addition could have pushed this game to a perfect ten.

If you have a friend to play with or enjoy co-operative play games, even without being a fan of role-playing games, you are going to find a lot to enjoy in Dark Alliance II. If you’re a role-playing game fan, you may perhaps be a bit disappointed that Dark Alliance II is an action packed romp, but look hard enough and there is depth to be found. Perhaps one day somebody will fuse the depth of a game like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with the sheer exuberant fun of a game like this. Until then, I’ll be more than happy to play through Dark Alliance II quite a few times.