Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance is truly, truly awful (Review)

hmm dungeons and dragons dark alliance is the worst game i've played this year by far it's truly truly awful i struggle to think about how to present this game to you in a way that didn't seem overly dramatic or hyperbolic because you know when someone says something like this is the worst game i've played this year your first inclination is to think come on you got to be exaggerating it can't be that bad so here's what i'm going to do i'm just going to show you gameplay and i'm going to explain what's happening in each clip and you can decide for yourself whether this game is worth your time and money i'm gonna do some editorializing at the front of this video just to explain what this game is and how it works etc because some things can't be fully communicated by gameplay eclipse alone but i'm gonna try and keep it to a minimum and especially in the second half of this video i'm just gonna let the gameplay speak for itself okay let's start dungeons and dragons dark alliance is a third person co-op dungeon brawler you select one of four predetermined characters there's no character customization available and after a brief story cutscene you're immediately dropped into the hub area there's a vendor there who'll sell you upgrades using one of dark alliance's seven different currencies uh over here is a trophy wall for some reason you can click on it to see a brief blurb about the bosses you've killed this is bugged i've killed multiple bosses and you can actually see their trophies on the wall but you can only actually see one of them in this menu that pops up over here is where i load into missions i walk up to this board i see the world map i select a node to see the various acts and once i've selected one i walk over to this area to begin the mission dark alliance is a co-op game that you can play with up to three other people there's no interface in the game itself to invite people to play with you you have to open up the steam overlay and invite people to your game using steam i assume on console you have to open up your friends list or something but i haven't tested that so i'm not sure right now you're only permitted to have one of each character type in the party so if two of you want to use the archer then bad luck if four of you are playing at once and you want to switch characters between you so i'll switch to the barbarian and you switch to the archer there's no interface for that because all the characters will be locked one person needs to leave the game lobby that frees up a slot so that someone else can grab the character they want to switch to your friend can then rejoin and select the other character the developers have told me that there's a patch coming that will allow you to use more than one character in a party but they didn't offer a timeline for that patch dark alliance has two core gameplay loops exploration and combat let's talk about exploration first levels in dark alliance vary in their aesthetic but they're always identical structurally you may be in a dwarven mine or a ravine or some sort of outdoor area but all the areas feel exactly the same because they are they are long corridors connecting large areas that serve as combat arenas you walk for a bit you see some enemies ahead just standing there you walk up to them you start fighting and you kill them and then you continue walking to the next area that formula never changes you might look at a game like this and you probably assume that most of it is going to be combat i would say about 50 or more of my time playing this game was just walking around big empty areas while clicking on resource nodes and chests often you'll encounter traps the most important thing to understand about traps is that there's no link between their damaging effects and their visual properties flame jets will damage you even when they aren't firing off here this purple ooze damages you if you stand in it but the visual denoting its limit is clearly bugs since i take damage when i'm well outside of it here i don't know what this is apparently this totally normal pile of skulls is fire uh even though i've stepped on identical piles of skulls before and they weren't fire the thing i quickly learned about traps in this game is that most of them are bugged and you cannot trust anything you see the last thing i'll say about exploration is that you shouldn't spend too long doing it because enemies respawn after a fairly short amount of time not sure why they do but they do dark alliance can be played co-op or solo when you die in co-op you can wait for a res and your party members can raise you an infinite number of times when you die while playing solo you immediately die and you get sent back to the last checkpoint i hate when games do this since it wouldn't have been game breaking to give solid players a limited number of self revives and it makes playing solo feel like hard mode when it should just be a choice that doesn't carry those sorts of consequences more profoundly when you're playing solo it's clear that this game just wasn't designed for that enemy health their attack patterns their telegraphs none of this feels like you're meant to be doing this on your own it feels like you're playing a four player game solo this boss is a perfect example this boss is a lich who is constantly shooting at me from range and he's endlessly spawning high hp enemies around me i'm being attacked at all times by at least six ads many of whom will launch themselves from across the screen with no warning at one point i actually get completely boxed in because there's so many of them and they're so oppressive and i can't actually roll through enemies so i just die here funnily enough after wiping to this four or five times the boss just eventually bugs out d spawns when he's at half health and i complete the mission balancing is also completely broken when playing solo this was my first solo mission after having played co-op with friends in co-op play enemies felt extremely spongy to the point of being frustrating here's what happened the first time i played solo at the recommended power level for this mission damn your arrows the entire mission was just me walking around one or two shotting everything later on i switched over to the barbarian and did missions at the recommended power level for him and everything had so much health that it was just so frustrating high hp enemies would just soak up hit after hits a lot of this was masked by the co-op experience because you didn't know how much power your friends were actually bringing but when you're solo you can feel these absurd jumps in enemy scaling and you have no actual means of predicting how cruisy or how challenging each mission might be either way it's extremely clear that this game was not designed to be played solo despite it offering it as an option if you do choose to play this be sure to play it with other people this is probably a good time to talk about the overall design philosophy of combat in this game if you've played the baldur's gate dark alliance games of yore you might remember them as competent yet accessible arpgs dungeons and dragons dark alliance is different from its predecessor in that it's not an arpg it's third person the previous games focused on hack and slash actions similar to diablo it was about throwing heaps of enemies at you and carving a path through them at a relentless pace it was essentially an empowerment fantasy where you were 10 times stronger than the forces of darkness allied against you and the only way your enemies could challenge you was through volume throwing more and more foes at you in the hope that you would eventually be overwhelmed dungeons and dragons dark alliance goes a different route the intent here isn't to make you feel powerful it's actually about making you feel extremely weak sometimes enemies can one or two-shot you even at the recommended power level like this and this and depending on the random scaling lottery that you play every time you load up a mission enemies will often just have huge amounts of health you'll notice each combat arena only has a handful of enemies but because they have so much health combat encounters in a single area can take around three to five minutes depending on the types of enemies you're fighting so with so few enemies on the field and with each of them having so much hp how are the developers throttled combat so it doesn't just feel like endless mindless repetitive button spam their answer to this was resource management notably the inclusion of a stamina bar many of your actions will consume stamina with heavy attacks using more stamina here's where it gets really fun when you use heavy attacks not only does it consume stamina but it also reduces your maximum stamina and the only way to replenish it is with a potion that has three charges and you can only refill that potion at a checkpoint and if you do that you essentially lose out on bonus loot since each checkpoint gives you a choice either refill your health and potions or keep going but you get bonus loot i played the majority of my time with the archer caddy bree it's no exaggeration to say that i spent at least a quarter maybe even a third of my time stamina starved just unable to do anything because i was out of stamina when you try and attack when you're out of stamina it locks you into this really slow roundhouse kick animation that leaves you really exposed i struggle to put into words just how much i hated playing this class i always choose the archer in every game where that's an option that's just my thing this was pretty much the most frustrating archer i've ever controlled because i constantly had to stand there waiting for my stamina to refill so that i could actually do anything and then there were huge quality of life issues with this class as well for example i have two abilities i can use like an aoe heal or some vines that are mobilized targets you'd think that i could aim where to cast these given that i'm a range class but no they only cast where i'm standing if i'm sitting back shooting stuff at a distance and i want to use an ability i need to run into the middle of a fight use my ability and then run back out oh and the process of shooting so when you fire if you press the fire button again too fast it will very often not register that you've pressed it and as a result you're like holding down this button thinking you're pulling back your bow string but after two seconds you realize that you weren't doing anything at all you were literally just standing there uh this is really hard to see actually because caddy breeze model doesn't actually move when she fires you'll notice like her body just is completely immobile it's just her arm that moves at the top with so yeah it's it's it's hard to see anyway back to stamina i'm constantly stamina starved on this character my maximum stamina is constantly at half capacity because i burn through it so fast i can't refill it because i usually have no potions i had assumed that this stamina system was a core feature of the game across all classes to sort of slow them down and make combat decisions feel more high risk then i played the barbarian and i can spam every heavy attack i have forever i'll basically never run out of stamina and my maximum stamina will never reduce i just i just can't empty my stamina bar i was like what is going on here how can you have one class that is constantly stamina starved crippled by the stamina bar and yet another class that gets to completely ignore this mechanic and just gets to do whatever the hell they want this is me spamming the heavy attack button on a boss watch my stamina it barely goes below half and the max stamina basically doesn't reduce at all so this is probably a good time to talk about bosses um with that boss you might have noticed that i just stun locked him to death he didn't fight back at all here's another boss that does that since we box him into a corner here's another boss that does that since we box him into a corner [Music] here's another boss that does that since we box him into a corner i've already mentioned the boss that just despawned halfway through the encounter here's one boss that i killed in around three hits he had less hp than all of the adds that were protecting him this boss here just respawns four times he doesn't do anything different throughout the fight you don't have to do anything different each time i just hit him with the same heavy attack spam over and over again he dies three times and on the fourth time he dies permanently this boss has a grapple attack let me show you what the animation looks like this is actually a standard enemy repurposed as a boss and their grapple attack has no animation to accompany it for your character when they get grappled so it will actually just slide your character model still standing uh toward him that's that's how it's done it here's another boss who just chooses to chill out for a bit and stand there while i wail on his buddies uh it actually looks like he's bugged out here but he's not this is very normal behavior for enemies in this game overall controls in this game are awful every character feels like they are wading through a deep pool of molasses and their animation windups feel like they take an eternity i played this game over a few days and each time i did i just load the thought of having to pick up the controller and it's like steering these characters it felt like driving a shopping cart through a peat box it was terrible hit detection is laughably bad here's some footage of me just repeatedly shooting and mailing a boss and no hits register at all until suddenly they do here's a clip of me shooting an enemy point blank in the face and nothing happens if you're fighting an enemy and it gets too close to a ledge it will simply teleport behind you like this here's me throwing my hammer at this enemy and it does this like magic bullet thing to arrive at the other guy you'll notice that uh the enemies didn't aggro while i was doing this and will certainly come back to that point as you fight you're encouraged to chain together your attacks to form unique combos what you'll start to notice is that the last few hits of your combos will very often miss because your character is sort of moving forward with the combo animation without properly tracking the target the obvious solution to this is to lock onto your target with the camera lock button here's what happens when you do that first time i use this camera lock feature i laughed hysterically i couldn't believe that this was a thing all you want is to be able to maintain your existing field of view while also focusing your attacks on a single target what this perspective does is it zooms in so tight that you completely lose all of your peripheral vision in a game that is dependent on your peripheral vision i mean the larger enemies in this game are so large that you can't even see all of their character models when you use this viewpoint so it actually makes it harder to fight them because this camera lock is so utterly unusable you have to constantly just accept the fact that your attacks are going to hit the wrong targets or that the final hits in your combos just won't land because the animation tracking isn't good enough each character has two abilities they can use and an ultimate and these will regularly bug out the cooldown will be consumed but the effect will not trigger it will cancel early or it will just sort of like stop working halfway through here's a clip of me popping my ultimate and then it's just not working despite the fact that the game says it's active sometimes you just get booted from a mission for absolutely no reason here's me just doing my thing when all of a sudden i get booted back to camp i actually ended the recording before arriving back at camp but trust me it happened you'll experience it for yourself if you play this game let's talk about elevation this game is not programmed in such a way that allows for your attacks or abilities to strike at higher or lower elevations here's what happens when i use an ability when i'm above a target even minor differences in elevation can render your class useless here i try to shoot targets while on a staircase and my shots simply go over my target's head and then there are the times when your character can't walk up a one inch ledge all right it's time to bring this bad boy home let's talk about enemy ai uh i don't know that i've ever seen worse ai in a fully released video game first thing i noticed was that enemies typically will not aggro when you walk up to them yeah you typically have about three to eight seconds worth of grace before the ai recognizes that you're there and enemies will begin doing things here's an example as soon as you realize this you learn you can actually run through the entire level without needing to fight anything except the enemies who drop the macguffins like the keys or whatever sometimes enemies just won't aggro at all no matter how long you stand in front of them like this guy often enemies will just stop doing anything during combat and they'll vacantly stare as you puree their buddies like this guy when playing solo i quickly learned that if you shoot an enemy from a position that they cannot reach not only will they not aggro but they'll continue their conversations with their buddies while you pick them off one by one like this combat arenas are programmed to spawn in new enemies when others die that sequence persists even if you kill enemies before anything is aggroed here's a clip of new enemies showing up after i clear out other enemies even though that nothing has actually aggroed enemies cannot navigate gaps here when i jump over a gap the enemies will leash slowly walking back to their spawn points while i continue to wail on them bottom line enemies simply do not register that you exist at all until you enter their combat arena and nothing you do can aggro them at first i thought this was an issue in relation to topography as in the ai was coded in such a way that it wouldn't trigger until it could find a path to you over time i began to realize that this issue was deeper than that in essence the ai in this game is not programmed to be able to properly engage a target at range they simply don't know what to do here i've agreed a bunch of enemies but they don't know how to properly engage me so they basically just stand there while i shoot them here's a clearer example i'm fighting these two awk things and they don't know what to do so they just stand there while i shoot them this takes a really long time by the way because i'm always waiting for my stamina to refill this behavior is not specific to the archer by the way i've already showed you a clip of me throwing my hammer as a barbarian here's the same clip but you can see how i'm able to clear out the entire section of enemies before any of them aggro later on i was struggling against this boss because he had so much health and had all these frustrating melee attacks and no telegraphs and terrible hitbox porn eventually i remembered that this boss couldn't handle ranged attacks so i just let him jump into the fire which is something he very often did and then i just threw my hammer at him until he died and that was how i killed him i roped my editor austin and my friend zendu into this i felt really bad about doing that i really owe them one after about two hours of play we're in the middle of a level and austin was like oh i just got a call from my girlfriend gotta go sorry and we were like sure you did buddy but don't worry like i'd have made an excuse to stop playing this game as well if i could zendrew and i ended up finishing that level and then i asked him at the end i'm like so you up for another one and he was like no no i am definitely not i am done here and he logged off and i was so jealous of him because i knew that unlike me he never had to play this video game ever again i pressed on for a number of hours after that playing solo the straw that broke the camel's back was here when i went up against four trolls now trolls have a lot of health and they do a lot of damage and they also regen their health at a rate which generally like outpaces my dps usually you fight one of these things sometimes two this section asked me to fight four at once it was extremely frustrating i died repeatedly but as i began to make progress and i killed like one or two of them i began to notice that this section was spawning in even more trolls so i had to kill like six trolls to get past this section i died some more but eventually i got down to the last few i was really close the trolls have an ability where they can freeze you and like stasis in destiny you have to spam the x button to break free as i was getting really close to getting past all of this i got frozen and then the button prompt thing it just completely bugged out i was spamming the x button and nothing was happening i died i immediately uninstalled the game dungeons and dragons dark alliance is available for 40 us dollars that is a complete waste of your money it's also available on game pass for both pc and xbox consoles it is a complete waste of your bandwidth to download it and a complete waste of your hard drive space to store it i do not recommend dungeons and dragons dark alliance i see you gamers i see you out there doing your judy roulettes grinding your pinnacles in destiny doing your netherwing dailies and classic wow sitting in overwatch dps queues for 30 minutes plus i see you but i respect that that's that's how i spend my time as well well except for overwatch of course but what if you can do all of those things while also becoming a better person smarter more interesting more attractive okay maybe not more attractive but definitely smarter enter curiosity stream it's netflix for nerds it's hulu for history buffs it's the disney plus for the scientists in us i wish i could say i came up with those zingers but they were part of the brief well played curiosity stream curiosity stream has thousands of streamable documentaries and non-fiction tv shows on topics like history and nature and science and food and technology and a bunch more it has over 35 collections of curated programs handpicked by their experts and it can be streamed to any device i use it on my second monitor while i'm playing anything that doesn't require my 100 undivided attention i know i'm wasting time when i'm playing destiny so curiosity stream makes me feel better about that because at least i can get to learn about quantum physics while i'm doing it and that's that's only a good thing if you use offer code skill up it's 14.99 for the entire year 12 months unlimited access to all of this goodness 14.99 that's less than a destiny transmog pack and a hell of a lot better for you to get started visit curiositystream forward slash skill up and use offer code skillup at checkout thanks curiositystream for sponsoring the video and thank you for watching it thanks for watching my video if you liked it give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down so i know to do better for next time if you enjoyed yourself consider subscribing and if you really enjoyed yourself maybe consider hitting that notification bell so you never miss a video you can see my patrons here on the left they're awesome they're amazing if you want to join them check out my patreon page thank you again i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Skill Up

Views: 925,831

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, dark alliance gameplay, dark alliance, dark alliance preview, dark alliance impressions, dark alliance review, dark alliance release date, dark alliance ps5, dark alliance pc, dark alliance xbox series x, dark alliance guide, dungeons and dragons dark alliance, Drizzt do 'urden gameplay, catti brie gameplay, bruenor battlehammer gameplay, wulfgar gameplay, Dungeons and Dragons Dark Alliance Review, trailer, release date, gamepass

Id: jIEOF-Aa1Rk

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 21 2021