Dungeon Siege 2 Review

Summary

Fantasy role playing games have it's share of classic PC games. The Baldur's Gate and the Diablo series are the most popular and highly acclaimed, but fans of the Dungeon Siege series will put up a fierce argument if you fail to mention their beloved series. Dungeon Siege 2 improves upon 2002's original by increasing the scope and giving you more typical RPG style control over your characters development.

Gameplay/Story

There are three different levels of difficulty in Dungeon Siege 2 but the game forces you to start at the easiest level and only unlocks the two harder levels after you've finished the game at the easy level. It begins with you selecting your characters and creating a two character party. As you progress through the game you will have the opportunity to increase the size of your party up to a maximum of 6 characters. Each character is fully customizable and is awarded skill points used to impove your character's abilities. They can be allocated to one set of skills or spread around in the various areas of melee combat, ranged combat, combat magic, or nature magic. This enables you to make a sort of dual-classed character, although the more you spread your skill points around, the more "average" your character will be. It's better to concentrate each party member in one or two areas of specialty.

The story for Dungeon Siege 2 is quite engaging, there are a total of 3 chapters or acts with each containing about a ten missions. The missions of course have set objectives that need to be accomplished in order to proceed but also includes mini quests along the way which will help you advance your skill and power. The story begins with you, the adventurer/mercenary, being hired by a mysterious man to find the pieces to the broken shield of Azunai. This quest will take you on an adventure through forests, temples, dungeons and into pitched battles with monsters and villains looking for the pieces as well as trying to prevent you from discovering the lost pieces. A wide variety of monsters will found throughout the game and as you defeat them you'll have the opportunity to grab their loot which may include magical and enchanted weapons and equipment that will help make your characters more powerful.

The original Dungeon Siege's graphics were very well received both by critics and gamers alike, Dungeon Siege 2 delivers good graphics and animations but it's not quite the head turning graphics seen from the original back in 2002. There are also numerous storyline movie cut-ins which at times can become tiring at times and in my opinion slow things down.

A very nice addition to Dungeon Siege 2 is the co-op mode which allows you to play the same storyline/missions via the internet with friends. Each person will control and customize their character's development through out the game. The co-op mode also gives you the opportunity to import your characters used in your single player campaign, but character development is kept separate.

With dozens of massively multiplayer RPGs it's easy to pass over a single player RPG not named Diablo or Baldur's Gate, but Dungeon Siege 2 does things right by keeping game play simple and having a good storyline. It improves upon many aspects of the original that didn't work and turns out to be an overall good game and sequel. One improvement I would like to see in a patch is allowing players to select harder difficulty level without having to play through the game's storyline first.