On June 17th, Dungeon Siege was released in European countries. I began playing it the following day!

So after playing one week of dungeon siege, what do I think of it.

At the beginning

At the very first of the game, you are presented four characters. From this list you have to choose which to incarnate.

• Lucas Montbarron: he seems to be the archetype of the warrior, sword and shield, noble descendant.
• Anjali: can transform at will from human to fire avatar, she is with no doubt from another world. Difficult to say at first if she is the magical type or physical one. Maybe both.
• Reinhart Manx : He is the magical dude for sure. Fighting with magic, teleporting, area of effect spells.
• Katarina: Illegitimate daughter of the Montbarron, she handles riffles and guns, included magic to empower her attacks.

Reinhart Manx

Character discovery

Story drawing

So each character is given two stances: one hand/two hands, human/fire, single target/multi-targets. At level 1 you already have two skills to use, one per stance. Skills are divided into three categories. Two for each stance plus one defensive categories. Depending on the level of your character, new skills will be available. Each skill can be upgraded in a custom manner at each level. So you can prioritise your type of combat with this system. Besides skills, you will be awarded point to be put on passive bonus.

It’s interesting to see that the story is slightly different depending the character you choose and actions you took. For example, one of your first tasks will be to rescue another character. So that will infer the story line if you have this character. Even cinematics, which are drawn with pencils can be dependent of what you have done.

Mechanics

HUD

Mechanics are quite different from what I have played recently. Magic points (focus) are regenerated when hitting enemies and hit point by using defensive skill. Another way to get hit point or focus is by grabbing little orbs dropped by enemies as they die. But you can’t rest. To use defensive skill, you need a power sphere. These are build up as you hit enemies and consumed every time you use one defensive skill, or an empowered spell.

Controls

Controls is the real dark point of this game. Again it’s a game which has been ported from console. First: controls are not customisable! You have to stick with

• A/D (Q/D) for camera control (which have been a time inverted so D was making the camera aim right O_o. If you want to change it, there is currently no way to do this)

• W/S (Z/S) for move forward, move backward.

• Mouse wheel toggle the two views you are given.

• Holding left click make the character move in that direction.

• Right click makes you shoot. (it appears that shooting fails to follow mouse direction in some situations, the character preferring to shoot in front of her)

• Space to block.

• 1,2,3 for skills and 4,5,6 (or space 1,2,3) for defensive skills.

• T is iTems, X is quests, C is Character, E is usE. Tab changes minimap zoom.

It is also a shame that the different statistics are not explained. Even the “Help topics” are not very explaining that. I intended to have a little more insight on these.

Items and influence

You will find items during your quests, from enemies or merchants or chests. For an obscure reason, the price you will see on them is not the price you will be selling it to the merchants. I did not purchase many objects during my normal mode campaign. Just a few before the last battle as they were rare items. But I did not even have enough money to stuff me and my heroes and “lucky” for me the merchant I saved was offering me discount ! Errr… really? By the way all items are stored in a single bag and you will have to sell them or transmute them for money if you need more space. I tried to save them to equip other heroes I would meet but ended up having to make frequent clearing of inventory since I could not pick up any additional gears.

During the campaign you can also build up influence with your companions. Ok. And then what? Well I don’t know. Did it influenced the game in some way? I can not tell since no hint have been given whether it have served me or not.

Conclusion

Well after all, the game is interesting, with good music and even though it suffers from the poor control system it’s still playable. I had fun playing it and even making decisions was difficult sometimes. I guess that, even if I found the story a little short (played a long week-end, plus some nights during the week), I can still explore possibilities by playing other heroes and making different choices. I hope this will lead me to other parts of the story that has been hidden to me. Maybe it could have been interesting to have an “after the plot” system, to finish ongoing quest and enjoy your stuffed character.