G4TV

Dungeons & Dragons Tactics is an automated version of the combat system in the D&D pen-and-paper games. That’s about it. You roll up some characters or pick out pre-made ones, head into battle, beat down packs of goblins or bugbears or gnolls, and head on back into town to gear up for the next expedition.

Once again, that’s about it. There’s not a great deal of story stringing all those encounters together or much of the exploration or character interaction that makes the better D&D games worth playing. Neverwinter Nights this ain’t - nor is it Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale, or Planescape: Torment. Even the old-school Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance arguably had more to offer, although their graphics were obviously a tad bit more primitive.

So the question arises, who’s going to want to play this? It’s probably not for the casual RPG fan, and fairly serious players may still run some trouble if they aren’t already well-versed in the mechanics of D&D combat. The hardest of the hardcore, meanwhile…well, they’re probably happy to play the real thing with pencils and dice in their garage.

Roll ‘Em Up

The character creation system, which is the first part of the game you’ll encounter upon powering it up, sums up a lot of what’s good and bad about D&D Tactics. On the one hand, there’s a lot of versatility available. The class selection includes several specialist types (not just the usual fighters, clerics, wizards, and thieves) and psionics are available in addition to traditional magic. If you want to kit out a player with specific skills and feats, there’s a long list of those on offer as well.

On the other hand, if you don’t know what all these skills and special abilities do – and the game goes to no great lengths to explain their practical uses – creating a character involves an awful lot of guesswork. Beginners won’t know exactly how they’ll do on the battlefield until they get there, by which time it’s too late to fix any mistakes. First-time players, then, are better served by picking from the roster of pre-made characters. In theory, at least, they’re set up for a greater degree of survivability. It’s not quite the same as using your own original adventurers, but it’s more fun than watching a whole party die like flies.

Speaking of Death…

Once the party’s together, it’s time to go out and beat up on some unsuspecting monsters. D&D Tactics has an overworld map like a great many other games with “Tactics” in the title – you simply move from location to location and select from a menu of options at each spot. Temples heal and resurrect characters, shops buy and sell different kinds of useful stuff, guilds hire out new party members, and quests give the party a chance to go out and fight.

Quest areas are big enough to offer some tactical depth, but not big enough that you spend a lot of time exploring them. This is a game about combat, not crawling around dungeons and solving puzzles and whatnot. Within a couple of turns of movement, the party should be good and stuck in with the opposition.

How much fun you have from there depends on how much you like an old-fashioned turn-based battle game. Tactics doesn’t look half bad – the 3D map is fully rotatable, which shows off some cool lighting effects from torches and spells and the like – but it still boils down to trudging from grid square to grid square, clobbering goblins and kobolds upside the head, and hoping there’s enough potions of Cure Light Wounds in your backpack to keep everyone alive.

As is the case with the character builder, if you’re not familiar with the D&D 3.5-edition mechanics it’s based on, the game doesn’t spend much time telling you how to take advantage of all the different combat tactics available. This is not just a game where you have to skim the manual, it’s vital to have the manual handy every step of the way.

The pace is slow, deliberate, and rewards a patient, conservative strategy. Getting ahead of yourself will get you killed, quickly. Tactics has a death rate from the old school of RPGs, especially when you’re learning the game in the early going. It’ll cost plenty to keep resurrecting all those dead party members, so it’s easy to wind up in the hole that’s hard to climb your way out.

D&D 101

Is it worth it, then, to learn what it takes to survive and keep slugging your way through the adventure? It would be easier to say “yes” if the game itself were all that helpful when it comes to teaching players how to play it, but it’s not. It’s complex, confusing, and demands a lot of trial and error to learn what works and what gets you killed. The slow pace makes it hard to get into the story and the fun of building up the party – it’s not like Baldur’s Gate, where the narrative constantly pulls you forward, or Diablo II, with its continuous flow of more and more nifty loot.

There’s just not enough of anything here, except combat, combat, and more combat. On a system as thick with RPGs as the PSP is these days, there are plenty of games with more to do, plus interesting stories and more visual flair besides. Unless combat’s all you want, give something else a look instead.

Review by: D.F. Smith