Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Reviews
This game is a worthy successor to the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance titles. Though the combat can become a bit repetitive, it's fast-paced and engaging for the most part. While playing solo, it's fun and challenging, and it's easy to see how it would flourish with a full group of players. It isn't perfect, but the over-the-top voice acting and character models, respect for Dungeons and Dragons lore, and intuitive combat make for a charming package. It's casual enough for anyone to pick up and play while retaining enough Dungeons and Dragons standards to keep experienced players of the tabletop game content. Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance is a fun action RPG, that has an opportunity to open up Dungeons and Dragons to a wider audience.
Infested with bugs from start to finish, Dark Alliance is a button mashing affair that drops the 5E rules in favor of flash. The bosses are great, but the parts in between less so. Here's hoping developer Tuque can pull this out of the Deep Wastes with their post-launch plans.
So many of these problems can and should be fixed. Better netcode will go a long way, and I expect to see improvements to the controls, the combat inputs, and hopefully even more mechanically intense boss fights. There’s a tendency to recommend bad games to the most devoted fans, but I think fans of Drizzt and Co. will hate this game even more than the uninitiated. The saving grace is that Dark Alliance is included with Game Pass, so it won’t cost you anything to check back in from time to time and see how it’s doing. There is an enjoyable game buried here, I just wouldn’t expect to see it anytime soon.
Dark Alliance returns after about sixteen years of oblivion. Tuque's work, which became an in-house development studio at Wizards of the Coast, despite having a rather grandiose name and glorious past, starts from scratch adopting some rather drastic (and not always winning) solutions, for the canons of the hack 'n' slash genre.
Review in Italian | Read full review
With its frustrating controls, and questionable AI the enjoyment that can be gained from Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is severely limited. If a player is looking to romp through a strongly realized D&D world, and a classic story of heroes scrambling to stop the legions of evil, it may be worth keeping the game on easy just to enjoy the setting and story. However, if you are looking for a full-fledged action RPG experience there are far better offering out there.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, which tells the story of The Icewind Dale Trilogy, is a looter slasher that requires Co-op. But, as for the fans of D&D, lacklustre combat and uninspired action will likely not satisfy.
Review in Korean | Read full review
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance offers a decent arcade action RPG experience, but suffers from midbudget jank and some questionable combat elements.
D&D Dark Alliance really brings the world of Dungeons & Dragons to life, with great monsters, tones of atmosphere and no microtransactions but is tragically held back by bugs and poor AI. The story is serviceable but I expected a little more from a D&D game based on a much-loved book series. Dark Alliance will appeal to D&D fans for its setting and characters and is a lot of fun with friends, especially when you work together to take down a might behemoth however, it feels like is severely lacking polish. If you were expecting a slower-paced, RPG, story-led experience this might not be for you, Dark Alliance is an ambitious, monster-slaying hack and slash but doesn't quite nail the landing.
In missions, players have two options upon clearing set areas, which are to increase the rarity of loot that will drop, or to rest at camp, which will create a checkpoint for the player and restore any used healing items. On the Legendary and Ascended difficulty - the final two tiers of difficulty the game offers - I would spend most of these instances resting at camp to refill my resources, because enemies at this level, be they goblins or frenzied psionic cultists, would simply evaporate my health with a single strike. That was also a normal occurrence if my character's power level did not meet the suggested requirement of the selected difficulty.
The creators probably didn't quite know what the Dark Alliance should be, so it is... completely bland. But it has at least beautiful locations.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Dark Alliance brings back the characters from RA Salvatore books, and we love that, but the gameplay is repetitive, and we found several technical issues, related to visuals, control and enemy AI.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Dark Alliance has the core of a fun game, but many design decisions and some very spotty enemy AI prevent the game from fully taking flight. While the game still feels early, there is some fun to be had running around and taking advantage of Dark Alliance's many issues. But with time, this game will become a mid-tier action adventure-which is exactly what it should be.
Offering up four-player online action in a familiar setting, D&D Dark Alliance looks good but is chock full of problems.
Overall, Dark Alliance needs a lot of work to truly warrant a playthrough and can only be recommended in its current state to massive fans of the book series who just want to know what happens in between books 1 and 2. The game itself is a masterpiece to look at, but falls short in the gameplay department, making this a tough sell for anyone who wasn't already going to pick it up and play simply based on its source material.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance isn’t a bad game, but it does feel insubstantial at the moment. The lack of character development, plot or world-building will probably turn away hardcore D&D fans. As for the fans of multiplayer action games, while the core of the experience is fairly solid, the lack of technical polish, repetitive structure and unexciting loot system will likely not satisfy for long. Hopefully over time, patches and additional content can flesh out the experience and make it the rollicking fantasy hack and slash multiplayer funfest it has the potential to be. Just make sure you don’t forget to bring a friend or three.
D&D: Dark Alliance is a case for people to hop on board to play the analog role-playing game it’s based on. This video game is so goddamn boring, infuriating, and repetitive, it’ll make you appreciate the intricacies of a live RPG session.
There are so many things half-baked, broken, glitchy, or simply baffling it's almost commendable.
Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance is the kind of game that has its own audience. If you're a fan of fantasy games and of course service-centric, don't miss Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance at all. Playing this game with friends is very enjoyable.
Review in Persian | Read full review
As this is on Game Pass the only thing you’re spending extra is your time. If you have a few friends to play with there are worse ways to go about it, but if you’re looking at this game solo then I’d say it’s a hard pass, free or not.
Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance has good ideas, but poor enemy variety, samey levels, bad puzzles, a shockingly poor story, the lack of local co-op, several quality-of-life issues, and numerous bugs that affect every aspect of the game make it hard to recommend to anyone, no matter how much they like the source material.