Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna

The Good
"Oh, nice graphics!" might be your first reaction. Then "ah, a poor relative of Morrowind." Later again "Neverwinter Nights, but somehow lacking". Still nice. You get to choose your sex, the colour of your hair, of your skin and of your clothes, and that's it. At least, this way you will never regret having started as a Bard when later in the game it becomes evident that a Fighter would have done much better. And the game has never crashed once on me in the twenty hours or so that I have played it.

The Bad
The interactions with your environment are limited to smash (a box), open (a chest), talk (to a friendly NPC), kill (everything that moves--friendly NPCs just stand there). The puzzles are limited to opening doors by operating a switch, and working lifts by operating a lever. The switch is always right next to the door, the lever right next to the lift. Your mouse pointer (normally a sword, even for moving) obligingly turns into a grabbing hand when hovered over the switch or the lever, just in case you had not made the connection between switch and door, lever and lift (sorry for all these repetitions, they are here to help you, just in case you hadn't made the connections yet). And your mouse pointer turns into a hammer when you come across a box you have to smash, and into a grabbing hand when you have to open it. No, no choice. You cannot try to open a box you must smash, and you cannot try to smash one you must open. Quite a few are trapped, but you cannot tell, and you cannot disarm traps. You soon learn to shoot every smashable box from as far as possible, with an arrow, a bolt or a spell. Smash! Pick up the loot. But openable things, well, tough for you if they are trapped, for you cannot open them from a distance. There are no locks to pick, no keys to find, because nothing is locked.

You will often come across the corpses of unlucky adventurers. You cannot search them. You will come across strange sculptures. You cannot examine them. You can do nothing with them, unless your mouse pointer turns into... have you guessed? yes! unless it turns into a hammer (smash them!) or a grabbing hand (open them!)

Combat? Oh yes, combat. Lots of it. Every few yards you walk outside towns, you are pretty sure to come across some nasties. Usually you can spot them before they spot you. In that case, order the stronger members of your party to move back and to hold ground. Send the weakest one as a scout, and have him run back as soon as the closest enemy notices him. With a bit of luck, you can kill them all in an ambush, taking them one by one. Sometimes YOU get ambushed. Just learn your lesson, reload, and set up YOUR ambush.

After a while it gets tedious of course, so you switch into God mode. Just hit "Enter", type "+zool", hit "Enter" again, and you're done. Now you don't have to worry setting up those carefully planned ambushes every other minute. Rip into a fight, go make yourself a cup of coffee, have a smoke, have a beer, come back. After a while it gets dangerous. Caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are fine, when used in moderation. But here you are soon courting death. So you hit "Enter" again, type "+drdeath", hit "Enter", and every blow you deal kills its target. Your characters won't grow in abilities anymore, and you cannot revert to normal damage, but, hey, it's a small price to pay for making this game almost playable.

Yes "almost playable". To make it playable, you would need to draw your own map of every "dungeon". Oh, there is a map facility (hit TAB), but even zoomed out to a max, you'll see only a tiny, tiny fraction of the "dungeon". So you never know precisely where you are, unless you have memorized every nook and cranny you have visited so far (no, you cannot scroll the map). There is a "world map" too (hit Shift-TAB) but it is completely useless. Worse: the local maps tell you nothing. Even when in a town, you just have to remember that this building is the Blacksmith, that one the Inn. You cannot annotate the map, like Neverwinter Nights lets you. There is no co-ordinate system telling you that you are at 62.26N, 23.51W. You don't remember where the Town Hall is? Tough. You'll just have to comb the place until you find it... and since the map displays only a small part of the town, and, remember, it is not scrollable... good luck and a lot of patience to you.

You will need a lot more patience in the "dungeons". They are huge, much, much larger than the towns, and you are soon hopelessly lost in a maze. Fortunately most of those mazes are of the kind you solve by hugging the right-hand wall, or cliff, or any other impassable terrain, at all times. No, of course not, there are no teleport spells or scrolls or anything that would allow you to mark a place and warp back to it. So that if, half-way through a dungeon, you want to sell your loot in the last town visited, or if you just yearn for fresh air, it will typically take you half an hour of retracing your steps (hugging the left-hand wall this time) and you will find your way back out. Then count on ten minutes hoofing it to town (the road is another maze, only smaller, with lots of dead ends), and then, once in town, up to five minutes going round in circles looking for a shop. Then it will be back to the dungeon, because this is a linear plot: "Do this, because you can't do that until you've done this".

Oh there are side quests all right. Thus, right at the beginning, a trapper asks you to kill a bear for him. No clues whatsoever as where to look for the bear. You go through the gates and, provided you have mastered the "hug the right wall/cliff/map-edge" trick, you go looking for it without getting too hopelessly lost. After a while you figure that the bear is nowhere near the wall you are hugging, you trace back your steps, and, at the town's entrance, walk along the left wall instead. With much patience, and after much wall-hugging, you might find it, and kill it. Then you have to return to town to tell the trapper the good news. Of course, after an hour or so of hugging walls, cliffs, map edges, all sorts of impassable terrain, you have forgotten where you met the fellow in the first place. So now you have to go around in circles until you find him. Thankfully (this should go into "The Good" section) the side quests are far and few between.

It is all as thrilling as travelling through a tangled garden hose or a monster's bowels, looking for the exit.

The Bottom Line
You have been swallowed by a giant troll. Your mission is to find your way out (hint: it is at the other end). This game is an insult to any gamer with more intelligence than a tapeworm.