Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics

Paul collapses under the weight of the menus...

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Perhaps I'm just fussy; perhaps what seems obvious to me isn't clear to others. I don't know, but there seems to be one overriding problem with Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics that ruins what could have been an enjoyable game. Frustratingly it's something that could have been avoided at almost any stage if only someone on the development team had stepped back and thought things through a little. Allow me to explain via the wonders of a simple analogy.

Imagine, you've come to the end of your driving test, you're sat sweaty palmed in the driving seat while the examiner scribbles away on his test sheet in the seat next to you. The waiting is almost painful, as he lowers his clip board and takes a deep breath. "Sorry, you've failed" he says. Your belly churns, your heart sinks and you ask "Why? What did I do wrong?". "Ah, sorry, can't tell you," he replies as he opens the car door and steps outside. "But I need to know, I need to make sure I improve next time." you call after him, but it's too late, he's gone, leaving you alone in the car never to understand what botched element of road etiquette caused you to fail. This is surprisingly similar to combat in D&D Tactics the new PSP game from Kuju Entertainment. Whacking enemies with a pointy stick sometimes achieves the desired result and sometimes does bugger all. Want to understand why so you can change your tactics? Tough, 'tis a secret.

Playing D&D traditionally, sitting around a table with friends, rolling dice and consulting a rule book, no doubt results in essentially the same black or white, hit or miss answer. The difference is that there the dice rolls are visible and the rule book always available to be perused, meaning any queries about why your brand new Pointy Stick Of Doom failed to fell that particular minion of the Dark Lord can be answered and understood allowing tactics to be modified accordingly for next time.

Of course veteran D&D'ers may laugh at me while explaining that the Pointy Stick Of Doom is OBVIOUSLY useless against a level ten minion until it's equipped with the BacoFoil Handle Of Destiny, but the point is I shouldn't need a working knowledge of all the complex D&D rules to understand simple in-game situations. By hiding all of the workings of the no doubt impressively accurate virtual dice rolling going on behind the scenes, D&D Tactics leaves gamers with less D&D experience staring down a black hole for important information, always a sure-fire cause of frustration in any game.

While I'm already having a moan, now seems as good a time as any to bring up the horrible interface that seems to have been designed to be as hard to navigate as possible. While the two-part, turn-based movement and combat is a nice idea on paper, everything just seems to take far more button presses to achieve than it should. Every action seemingly requiring the selection of a menu option or five. Even seemingly simple tasks such as inventory management (something you can expect to do a lot of in a game like this) is a painful exercise requiring the use of approximately a trillion screens to do what a more competent interface could do in a couple. As if proud of this the game also goes out of its way to ensure you'll need to keep going back through these screens with depressing regularity. Simply wanting to know if a new item will cause you to incur a weight penalty, or if an item is better than one you currently hold will involve you diving into the mountain of inventory screens to check rather than, for example, the game warning you about an item's weight or indicating if an item will improve your stats at the point when you pick it up.

All this negativity is a shame, I had been looking forward to getting stuck into something a bit meatier on my PSP, and the sad thing is that under all the problems are a few gaming gems that offer a glimpse at the title this could have been. For starters the very idea of squishing almost the full D&D 3.5 ruleset into a turn-based dungeon crawling RPG is a good one, throw in ideas like your actions dictating your alignment as well as your alignment dictating your progress and you have the basis for a potentially decent game.

While the story is heavy on the fantasy cliches about prophecies and magical brick-a-brac it does a decent job of driving the game along from one mission to the next. These missions are fought by characters picked from your six strong adventuring party, which can be made up from a selection of pre-rolled characters or generated fresh by the player. The expected races are all present and correct (human, elf, dwarf, halfling, half-orc, etc) as well the core D&D classes such as the mage, cleric, fighter and rogue, unfortunately the option to combine classes is conspicuous by its absence, so no more fighter/mage combos for those used to such things. The options to change the visual appearance of your characters are also basic at best, lagging well behind the stats twiddling ones.

The whole thing looks nice enough too, although there's some dodgy animation at times. The PSP's screen, as ever, does a good job of making the action look better than perhaps it deserves. The audio is blandly average throughout, in fact the only reason I mention it is that my first impression of the game was ruined somewhat when the music over the opening menu jumped and stuttered horribly for the first thirty seconds or so. There's a spot of wireless multiplayer tacked onto the back of things too if you can be bothered but it's rendered almost pointless due to your inability to use characters built up in the single player campaign and the limited number of maps available to play on when you do bite the bullet and re-roll a new one.

Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics is a strange game, its impenetrable combat will put off most D&D novices while the more experienced who are able to forgive (or simply understand) the lack of information will find its horrible interface minimises any enjoyment they may have. There's a genuinely good game to be made out of the ideas behind D&D Tactics, unfortunately this simply isn't it.

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By Paul Newcombe