Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Reviews
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was meant to be the spiritual successor to the 2001 classic Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance. Built as a hack n slash RPG, Dark Alliance brings to life the heroes of Icewind Dale and the epic story of the Crystal Shard.
I personally find it hard to fault a game when it sports a lower than average asking price on launch, but I cannot recommend this game to anyone. It's been nothing but a frustrating experience all throughout, with no redeeming gameplay qualities. But hey, at least the cutscenes were nice.
Dark Alliance has great potential for success, but missed the mark on what could have been a great time with your fellow party members.
Dark Alliance can lean on an enormous amount of lore. Many locations, friends, and enemies make an appearance. the level design is pretty good and challenges to explore. However, the game is held back by bugs and battles that just do not work. The game has huge potential but sadly falls short in execution.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
I don’t mind the game. I’m a big fan of the more traditional D&D games, but I also don’t mind a more brainless “mash keys and progress” type game and this arguably falls far more in that latter category. If you like a bit of Dungeon delving and aren’t too fussed about character details then this could be a good choice. If you really want page after page of stats and character story then this will probably leave you wanting.
Overall, Dark Alliance is a fun game for quick 30-minute sessions with friends. However, I’d personally want it to stay in development for longer so developers would fix some of the game’s issues. It’s highly detailed and beautiful, but that’s the only best quality I could say about it right now.
The fantasy genre is one we’re all familiar with. Whether it be The Lord of The Rings or shows like Netflix’s The Witcher, the genre has found a dedicated spot in modern pop culture. But it’s Dungeons and Dragons that really brought the fantasy genre to the fore, finding favour among the nerdiest of youths and the most famous of Hollywood actors. For a franchise as massive as D&D, you’d think that its adaptations and spinoffs into modern media would hold up pretty well. It’s why I got quite excited about the recently released D&D: Dark Alliance, which seeks to throw players into an epic campaign littered with all the trimmings of D&D’s vast universe. It accomplishes this to some degree, but as a whole, it feels closer to a critical fail than booming success.
Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance is an alright adventure, it’s got a fine amount of content and it’s good fun for a group.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance fails to live up to both the potential of its placement in the D&D canon and the legacy of the Dark Alliance name. As a mediocre-to-good game, depending on whether you're alone or with friends, the whole experience is sluggish and dull in execution, and sails close to the average tabletop D&D session where you play for four hours and somehow only walk down a single corridor, but without the enjoyment that comes with that experience.
As a devoted Dungeons and Dragons player, I can respect Dark Alliance for attempting to bridge the tabletop experience and the virtual plane. Unfortunately, the game is lackluster and has more flaws than redeemable qualities.
As a whole, I can’t recommend Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. If you’re attempting to play it on a last gen system, it’s almost impossible to get through. Even if you’re playing it on a current gen system, it’s still not worth your time. It’s simply not fun. It’s so bland and generic that it’s a slog to get through. There are many other co-op action adventure games out there are much more entertaining, such as Diablo III or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. And the latter isn’t even that good to begin with.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a game with great promise but poor-to-mediocre performance, depending on your affinity for action-oriented loot hunting and patience for AI and other technical shortcomings that should have been nipped in beta. But with promise comes optimism; Tuque Games has a robust DLC and expansion roadmap planned, so its continued investment in the game could lead to patches ameliorating my gripes. If it does, you’ll find that Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance reaches the lofty heights of its renowned spiritual predecessors. But if Tuque Games neglects these issues, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance will remain a fun but prohibitively frustrating game I can recommend to series devotees and few others.
If you love co-op based games, just look elsewhere, or simply wait before Dark Alliance will get all the necessary fixes and story expansions. As of right now, you can ignore the game completely, even on Game Pass.
Review in Russian | Read full review
I don't know who, in my right mind, I would recommend Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance to.
There’s room on the market for mindless action, especially when it can be played with friends. I’m glad a game like Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is on Game Pass because that’s the perfect way to get a group of friends playing together. I just wish that once they gathered, they had something better to play. Unfortunately, despite some parts of the game looking and sounding nice, there’s little else to recommend it. With awful AI, weightless combat, an unengaging story, and loot that feels inessential, the entire game is a slog. The biggest fans of Dungeons & Dragons may find a bit of fun with friends, but they deserve better than this.
Hacking and slashing with friends is always fun, but Dark Alliance has too many problems to recommend when so many other cooperative experiences offer more
You better go and read the Drizzt books for the time and money you will spend on this game.
Review in Turkish | Read full review
In closing ill say it again, Dark Alliance is not a perfectly executed game but the fun to be had when everything works is worth enduring the little issues. It delivers a fun D&D adventure with some epic combat moments. Even with the issues that I experienced I think this is a solid game and with a bit more polish via patches will fit quite nicely among its dungeon crawler brethren.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a lot of fun to play with friends, but it has enough issues to see it fall short of co-op greatness as it stands. A sketchy camera, dumb enemy AI, and some balancing issues can hold the experience back, especially when playing solo. It’s a shame too, because the combat of the game is enjoyable and collecting loot is really rewarding. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance just needs a little bit of fine-tuning around the edges before it can begin to feel like essential playing.