Review (PS2)

After playing through a bunch of action RPGs last year, I'd basically sworn off of them. In fact, to quote my Nox review, "I'm done with them. There are just too many kinds of games that work for me to spend any more time with such an inherently flawed game recipe."

So, have I come crawling back, foot in mouth, ready to finally sing the praises of an action RPG? No, not quite. If I could only get one game a year, I can honestly say that it would never be an action RPG. That's right, I said 'never', and I mean it. Luckily, I can get more than one game a year, which means I can cast a bigger net in the sea of gaming. And I admit that I did say I was done with action RPGs, which some might interpret as meaning I was never going to play another one. Why is it, then, that I'm sitting here writing a review of another action RPG? Two simple words: Co. Op. Ok, so that's one word. Whatever. I am perhaps the world's biggest sucker for co-op gameplay and it takes something obviously awful for me to not take the bait. Hell, co-op is the only reason that I ever ventured into action RPGs in the first place. My good friend and gaming buddy was playing Diablo II and I wanted to play with him.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, BGDA supports cooperative play, and it's fun. Simple and repetitive, but fun. Dark Alliance doesn't break any new ground at all in gameplay, but that's fine. Snowblind started with a proven recipe, and didn't deviate. Granted, I personally don't hold the recipe in terribly high regard, but it apparently satisfies millions of people, so what do I know. Just so we're clear, the recipe involves very simple real-time combat, character leveling, hordes upon hordes of stupid enemies, and gobs and gobs of randomly generated items.

As simple as that sounds, there's a lot of room to do right or do wrong by the recipe. Dungeon Siege took the recipe and went horribly wrong. Nox, on the other hand, took the recipe and crafted a fairly entertaining jaunt. So how does BGDA fare? It ranks as one of the best action RPGs, and for the same basic reason as Nox - it sticks close to its arcade heritage. In BGDA, your character does, and only does, whatever you have them do. There is no automatic attacking or defending, no automatic potion quaffing, no target locking. If you have your burly, ax-wielding dwarf execute his 'Bull Rush' attack and he happens to be facing a big post instead of the bad guy, well then he runs smack into the post. The combat in BGDA involves endlessly executing your character's attacks, while paying diligent attention to your health and magic meters (which stick to the Universal Health and Magic Meter Standards colors of red and blue). This is what the player does. And when you're not doing that, you're smashing every barrel and crate in sight, and buying and selling items by the metric ton.

So you either like doing that for extended periods, or you don't. BGDA has no delusions of being anything other than a bread-n-butter, button-mashing, Gauntlet clone. And it succeeds. If a game knows what it's trying to do and does it well, I'm not going to beat it about the head and face for not being something that I like more. Again, what made me the proud owner of BGDA was the promise of co-op play. And again, here it succeeds. Co-op play, for me, allowed the game to make the conversion from not-unpleasant time consumption to genuine fun. I don't know exactly why. Nothing fundamentally changes. If some activity wasn't holding my interest when it was just me, why would the same activity magically become different when I've got a friend along? I don't know, but there's an entire branch of science, sociology, dealing with the question. All I know is that playing games with my friends is fun, and BGDA lets me do just that, without getting in the way.

How does BGDA stay entertaining and playable? Well, it doesn't for very long, to be honest. It was palatable enough to get me through the game a couple times (both in co-op), and it hasn't worn off its welcome on me entirely. I haven't played the archer yet, and I can see myself getting through the campaign again; it's not that long. I think one of the reasons that this review doesn't effuse the same negativity as my Diablo 2 review is because I spent so much more time with Diablo 2, to the extent that it wore down my tolerance and I just got mad at it.

But more to the point, there are quite a few facets of BGDA that stoke its enjoyability. First, as I said, the combat has a basic arcade flavor to it, which gives the player a well-defined set of responsibilities. With any game that has a lot of rules-based math happening under the covers, it's important that the player be given specific and meaningful responsibilities, and also be given tangible feedback for their participation. In BGDA, the responsibility is direct control of the character. The player keeps the character alive. The player orients the character, swings the weapon, and raises the shield. The player decides when to drink potions, what feat or spell to use and when/how to use it. The player also deals with the inventory and equipping the character. Admittedly, this is where the real attraction exists for this kind of game, in my opinion: Getting cool stuff. This is also an area where BGDA does a great job with respect to the tangible feedback. The "paper doll" aspect of RPGs is in full effect here and BGDA rolls out the red carpet. Characters sport their weapons and armor fabulously in game. You'll orchestrate your character's progression from a jerkin-clad neophyte to a shining, decked-to-the-hilt, Dispenser of Death, and be able to witness the changes at every step of the way.

The other side of the RPG coin, attribute management, is also present, but isn't nearly as nice as the equipment side. Sure, you get to pick where to put skill points, and have to make decisions about how you're going to focus your character, but the process is pretty anemic. There aren't a lot of feats from which to pick for each character, and even from the already short list, some of them are obviously worthless, such as 'Shield Expert' for the dwarf, or 'Dodge'.

BGDA has a couple of egregious UI flaws. The worst is the fact that the inventory lists aren't circular, i.e. they won't roll over to the first item in the list when you've hit the last. This might not sound like a big deal. Believe me, it is. You spend a significant percentage of your time in the inventory menus, and once you've accumulated a good 30 or so items, it becomes very obnoxious to have to plow all the way through them to get back to the top (or bottom) of the list. When I see this stuff in games, I always wonder how it got past QA and playtesting, because it's the kind of thing that gets annoying after about 5 minutes of play. Another UI flaw is the inability to drop gold. This is only an issue in multiplayer, but definitely annoying. One of the character attributes that you can improve over time is 'charisma', which affects the prices for which items can be bought and sold. In a co-op game, it makes a huge difference over time if you have the character with the best charisma do all of the buying and selling. You can see how this is hindered severely by the fact that the other character can't give the charismatic character their gold. A very simple solution would be to have chars share a common purse in co-op games (if you transfer the char into another game, they bring 50% of the shared purse with them). In addition, it would be extremely convenient if all transactions in the shop used the "best price" of the party, instead of who happened to be actually buying/selling. In other words, just pretend that the most charismatic character was the one doing the buying/selling. It's particularly tedious having to transfer all of the junk to the charasmatic character just so they can sell it.

A less egregious UI issue has to do with attacking. I would very much like to be able to control my character's orientation without moving forward (basically, spin in place). The game lets you do this under certain circumstances, such as when the sorceress is casting certain sustained spells, and more generally whenever any character is using their bow. When using a melee weapon, however, you wind up constantly running around in little circles trying to line up with the enemies. Consequently, melee fighting tends to include a good deal of missed blows, and a lot of tail-chasing because you end up attacking just to the left or right of an enemy and then moving more than you wanted to because you couldn't just rotate. I've got a good fix for this, too. The right analog stick should be used to rotate your character. As it is, it's used to orient the camera. Now, I very much enjoy being able to orient the camera, thank you Snowblind. So, to get the best of both, I make the right analog stick semi-modal. If one of the shoulder buttons is pressed and held (say, L1) then the right analog stick moves the camera. Otherwise, the stick orients the character. God, would that vastly improve the combat.

I have one more little nit to pick, and it involves the dialogue of the shopkeepers. Basically, they talk too much. I found myself spending a LOT of time in the shop menus, comparing equipment, debating whether or not to buy this or that expensive new item, etc. Hearing the shopkeeper tell me that I smell like the sewers is funny the first, oh, 5 times I heard it. After 50 times, it starts to engender a special kind of hatred. As a game developer, you want anything that you expect to happen more than 10 times to be subtle. And short. Otherwise, it's going to become annoying. Trust me, now matter how cool or funny you think it is, it isn't after the 100th time.

On a positive note, at least all of the voice acting is really good!

Lastly, I want to comment on the multiplayer character management. First, let me say that I think it's great that BGDA lets you bring different characters into and out of a given game. You can convert a 1-player game to 2-player and vice versa. You can swap a character out for one from another game. This is all good. 100 brownie points for Snowblind. However, this makes the character storage mechanism decidedly unsatisfactory. The game treats the characters like they are independent objects, separate from the games, but it doesn't give you any means of viewing/saving/storing/managing those characters except within a saved game block. This situation is made even worse by two things: First, there's no way to identify which game blocks contain which characters. They're described only by the date of the saved game, and by the type of characters in it, Elf, Dwarf, or Archer. Second, you can't customize the characters at all. You can't give them names, or change their skin color or hair color, faces, etc. Guys, come on, it's an RPG, let the player specify their character's name. That's such a ridiculously easy feature to have. Granted, some RPGs have a story-line that requires a certain specificity to the character. I remember reading an interview with Warren Specter about Deus Ex, and how naming the character was a really thorny issue with the development team. Some of the developers were adamant that "if you can't name the character, it's not an RPG". Now, I'm not quite that zealous, but I certainly feel that if you don't have a good reason for not letting them name the character, then you damn well ought to let them do it. It's easy, and it really engenders a much stronger tie to the characters that in turn fosters a longer shelf life for the game. BGDA has no good reason for not letting you name the character, and it certainly has the perfect reason to let you do it, so you could differentiate the characters in your saved games. As it is, I'm stuck trying to remember that the game I saved on 10/12/03 has my sorceress, and the 1/22/03 game has my other sorceress. I think...

Also, why can't I play a co-op game with two characters of the same class? Again, on the one side, the game is encouraging you to invest and value your character, and to transfer them into various multiplayer games, and on the other side it kicks sand in your face. What's the deal here? Did some of the playtesters get confused when they were both playing a dwarf in the same game, and so it was decided that you just couldn't do that? I really can't think of any good excuse for this restriction, and all it does is reduce the circumstances under which people can enjoy the game.

Oh - one last thing. There are several short sections in the game that involve jumping puzzles. They're horrible. It's like a giant stye in the game's eye. It's obvious that you're expected to die repeatedly, because there are save spots before and after every single one of them. This basically says, "You're going to die a whole bunch right here and when you finally get past it, you're going to be so fed up with it that there's no chance in hell you'd want to do it again, so we've made sure to let you save your progress as soon as this is over." It's like going to the dentist. I also think that it was at least somewhat evident to them that their fancy jumping puzzles sucked, because they only show up twice, accounting for maybe 1% of the game. My question is, why the hell didn't they get rid of them altogether? Was it going to hurt someone's feelings? They're so bad that when my friends and I encounter them in co-op, one of us just jumps off the cliff and dies purposefully, letting the other person do the jumping, and respawns on the other side once it's over.

So is BGDA fun? Being an action RPG, this definitely depends on you. Some people love the mindless mashing, paper dolls, and the level treadmill. Some people can see from a mile away that it won't float their boat. As for me, I'm somewhere in between. Clearly, from a single-player perspective, there are probably a thousand games I'd rather play. For some reason, though, action RPGs are one of the only kinds of games that show up with co-operative play. I'll never understand the industry's discrimination of co-op. As it is, I'll have to take the good with the bad and get my co-op fix where I can get it. It's not such a bitter pill to swallow with BGDA. It's got fabulous graphics, diverse levels, and a real pick-up-and-play interface with a short list of frustrations.

I think BGDA is a textbook "gateway" game. It's the kind of thing that could get somebody into games. The graphics are snazzy, and the superb effects and animations of the monsters are enough to get somebody hooked into it with little effort. The pace is brisk enough to be exciting, but never forced and you can really only get into trouble by sprinting ahead and getting surrounded. Assuming they didn't have any aversion to the blood and dismemberment, someone would have trouble coming up with an excuse not to try it out. And being a console game with co-op makes the ride a smooth one. In all likelihood, after finishing the campaign, a newbie would be eager and willing to try something with a little more meat to it. What surprises me is how long people stick with some of these action RPGs. I just never get enough satisfaction from their gameplay to turn them into a permanent hobby game the way some people do. Of course, people look for different things from their gaming, and if gaming is just a way to unwind, relieve stress, and not think too much, while taking in some impressive technology, well then BGDA can be just what the doctor ordered.