Ranting Canuck

            This weekend I finished Dungeon Siege II by Gas powered games. This is the first game that I have finished in a long time, probably over six months or so. I just don’t have time for games anymore.

            Anyway I have not posted anything for a while so I thought I would post a little mini review of Dungeon Siege II by Gas powered games for the PC. DS2 came out about two years ago and when it did come out I tried it but I just could not get into it. I did play the original Dungeon Siege when it came out and got about half way through it before loosing interest in it.

            About three weeks ago I was looking for something to play and I thought I would give it another try. I installed it, it took while, it is 4 CD’s, and started to play. Like the first time I played it I did not really get into it at first but stayed at it and the game really started to grow on me. Three weeks later and I guessing about 50 hours later I finished it.

            All in all it was not a bad game it is not a great game but not a bad game. Graphics wise it is not spectacular I was able to run it on max settings on my computer. Considering the game is two years old they are pretty good, I have seen new games with worse graphics to be honest. One thing graphically that did stand out is that the title screen graphics are low resolution and look really bad. Not sure why the developers did not spend ten extra minutes and clean them up.

            Dungeon Siege II is an action Role playing game, similar to the Diablo series and the hundred knock off Diablo games. Dungeon Siege II is not really a knock off of Diablo since it does add a lot of things missing in Diablo most notability parties and a story.

            Like all action RPG’s you basically kill hundreds if not tens of thousand enemies as your progress through the game, in Dungeon Siege II. Your party members have decent AI and you can set spells that they will cast automatically. This has caused some people to joke that Dungeon Siege II plays itself. This is true to a degree but it is a good thing because if it did not the game would be exponentially more difficult if not impossible. There are times where you are literally fighting thirty enemies all I real time!

            One thing that really annoyed and annoy about so many RPG’s is that there was not enough variety in enemies. There are maybe thirty to forty different enemies’ models in the game, including boss models, so the developers ended up reusing the same models over and over again. All that they do is change the color of the model and make it hit harder and have more hit points, bam new enemy. Really how hard would it be to introduce more models so that it does not feel like you are killing the same enemy two thousand times only to face the newly named and colored brethren later on.

            Dungeon Siege II does have a decent story and the game is generally speaking pretty linear. The story pulls the user through the game although there are some option side quests I maybe did 75% of them.  There are some puzzles in the game but they are pretty easy, there was one that took me maybe thirty minutes to figure out. Towards the end the story does fall apart, you know how the game is going to end and you know you are near the end. Yet you are still forced to fight your way up a tower to the final battle or what you think it will be killing hundreds of enemies. You kill the evil dark mage and you then have to go further up the tower killing more enemies to the final battle. The game ends leaving it very much open to sequel or expansion package. The actually ending kind of stinks it really anti climatic.  

            All in all I would recommend Dungeon Siege II for most people especially for people who have busy schedules are not able to commit a huge number of hours to game at single sitting. Dungeon Siege II’s levels are divided up into manageable chunks so even if you are only playing for thirty minutes you can feel like you accomplished something. There is also a quest log and other tools that help to remind you what you are supposed to be doing. This is an important feature for me, I love RPG games but I find that often I don’t have time to play them for an extended period of time. So I loose track of what I am doing and give up on them.