Tactically Sound
Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics blends pen-and-paper rules with strategy RPG gameplay to impressive effect.
Published: September 30, 2007
As soon as one of your troops hears or spots and enemy, or vice versa, the game switches to Combat Phase and from there it becomes a turn-based fight using the Initiative values calculated by the game. All the combat mechanics from the pen & paper game are here, from attacks of opportunity to spell and weapon ranges, to areas of effect, to being caught "flat-footed" (off-guard), and on and on. If you cast Fireball with your Wizard and you forgot that it explodes on the first thing it hits, and you try to cast it through your party members, be prepared to restart the map.
Story-wise, it's a lot better than I expected, although there is one plot point that is a major RPG cliché. That's forgivable though because the rest of the story is crafted pretty well, especially in that it takes your party through a wide assortment of locations with varying terrain. You'll explore forests, caves, valleys, hills, elven encampments in the treetops, old gothic castles, and plenty of other exotic locales that keep the game from getting stale. The enemies you'll encounter are just as varied. You'll fight all kinds of different animals, humanoids, undead, and everything in between.
This game isn't without its faults though. First of all, the sounds aren't very good. The character voices and grunts they make are really annoying. Also there's not a single piece of music in this game that isn't repetitive and annoying. Fortunately there's a way to turn music and sound levels down, so that helps. Character models aren't very good either, but fortunately this game isn't supposed to be a graphical masterpiece, and playing with the camera in top-down position means you don't have to look at them.
The game can also run a little slow when there's a lot going on in the area, especially in fights where a lot of enemies are involved. There is a "Chess Mode" option that drastically reduces animations, but the problem with that is that when the multiple enemies take multiple actions in sequence, things actually happen too fast and when it gets back to one of your characters you usually have to take some time to highlight all your troops to see how they're doing.
The biggest thing I didn't like, however, was that they left out a staple feature of modern RPGs, and that's the ability to scroll through items in the shops and instantly be able to see how they would affect your character if you bought them. This is unacceptable because now I have to write down what all my guys are carrying around.
Those things aside, there are also features I wasn't expecting, like the fact that all the shops in all the locations remember what you've bought and sold, so if you pick up a really cool magic item and then sell it because it's useless to you at the time, you can come back way later and buy it back when you need it (at twice the cost you sold it for of course). This will probably happen to you more than once during a playthrough because unless you have a party full of people with high STR attributes, you simply can't carry around everything you find until it becomes useful. Remember that this game is true to the D&D rules, and that means encumberment rules are in effect, and there's no store house to keep extra loot in, so you'll have to manage your gear. Money isn't usually a huge problem after the first handful of missions so it's not like you'll go broke buying back items you've hocked.
I also want to point out that the level design in this game is excellent. Not only are the levels realistically laid out, they're also really detailed and atmospheric. You'll definitely need torches and Light spells when you go down into a cave.
The bottom line is that this is a solid title that anyone who is a fan of D&D or SRPGs should take a look at. It isn't perfect, but it has a couple dozen hours of playtime, a good story, and plenty of replay value in that there are more character classes than you can effectively use in a single playthrough, so you can experiment with the first few maps to get a feel for how each class plays. This is a game I'll be playing for quite some time.
