Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Reviews
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.
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.
I don't know who, in my right mind, I would recommend Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance to.
The single positive thing Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance does is end, though sadly, not nearly soon enough.
I just didn’t expect it could be this bad. Dark Alliance is a functionally broken product. When enemies simply ignore you as you carve their health down to zero, when there’s so little to the game that that’s all you’re doing, and when the multiplayer experience is only superior because it’s a chance to share the misery with someone else, some passable graphics and one neat checkpointing system aren't anywhere near enough to redeem this game. This is the poorest handling of a license since Superman 64.
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.
There are so many things half-baked, broken, glitchy, or simply baffling it's almost commendable.
It's difficult to recommend Dark Alliance to anyone else than biggest fans of Forgotten Realms's lore. The game definitely lacks of polish and doesn't shine at all when you talk about its gameplay, graphics or even its multiplayer options.
Review in French | Read full review
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.
A tragically awful attempt to revive the Dark Alliance name, with horribly repetitive combat, empty storytelling, and a dragon horde's worth of bugs.
Dull and clunky, this is one hell of a weak, uninspired action game that's plagued with poor design choices and technical issues.
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.
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.
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.
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
Dark Alliance is a dull and unpolished multiplayer action RPG with repetitive and glitchy combat, broken online connectivity, unbalanced solo play, and more than enough technical issues to put off anyone even slightly interested in checking it out.
I wanted to love Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance so badly. I grew up reading R.A. Salvatore’s novels about Drizzt and his companions. Baldur’s Gate was my first CRPG that I ever played. The original Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Dark Alliance II are probably my favorite games from the PS2 era. But sadly, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance just misses the mark in so many categories. It was a slog to get through, and there is almost no reason for me to ever pick it up again.
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.
I wrack my brain trying to figure out Dark Alliance’s strengths, and I’m not coming up with much. The level design works surprisingly well for multiplayer. I was afraid looting would fall by the wayside, but every time a fight would wrap up, everyone would run off in different directions and grab chests before finally moving on. I didn’t feel like things were getting missed. Well, except for the shoes that would pop out of chests some other player would open. Those just rot, forgotten on the ground.