What’s Good About: Dungeons and Dragons Dark Alliance
Let’s just rip the band-aid right off: Dungeons and Dragons Dark Alliance is mostly okay. It’s also probably some of the most fun I’ve had with a multiplayer game this year. This is weirdly enough, one of the rare times when a game being in a janky state can make the experience more entertaining. I’ll get to that later.
There is a story, but I found myself largely not paying attention to it because of the aforementioned “Get in, whoop stuff, get loot” aspect being front and center. There’s this MacGuffin that gets lost by an evil wizard and the titular “Dark Alliance” made up of Goblins, Trolls, Dueragar, the evil cult worshipping the MacGuffin founded by the aforementioned evil wizard and even a Beholder all assault the halls of Clan Battlehammer because that’s where the shard landed. Now it’s up to Bruenor Battlehammer, the clan’s king to push the Dark Alliance out with the help of his adoptive children; the ranger Cattie-Brie and the Barbarian Wulfgar, and joining them is their ally, the Ranger/Fighter (and launcher of a thousand expies) Drizzt Do’Urden. It’s pretty standard fantasy stuff, but it works well enough because of the interaction between the four main characters and how well they all manage to bounce off of each other.
The game is also pretty serviceable to play on top of the above. A good chunk of this comes from the use of a more action-oriented combat system. Its controls take very obvious inspiration from Dark Souls, but the pace is much faster, less difficult, and with more animation-canceling. You can go through the various missions alone and with others, and when I first played the first act of the first quest chain, I found the game to be the ultimate podcast game; something I can turn off the audio of and just listen to things in the background or talk to other people while I do it. I don’t want to feel like I’m being unfair to the game by saying this. It feels good enough to play that I wouldn’t mind doing things solo with other characters when I get the chance to and I want to try the other characters out because I’ve mostly stuck with Bruenor, the game’s designated tank. The other characters fit different niches as well if getting hit in the face isn’t your thing: Wulfgar charges in and rages whilst using a big hammer, Cattie-Brie is the game’s designated ranged character and can use magic arrows for different effects, and Drizzt focuses more on the stealthier and assassin-like aspects of his character to differentiate himself from Cattie, using Dual Scimitars and shadow magic to cloak himself and get backstabs off. Loot is instanced, but can only be gathered after missions from a chest at base camp.
And then there’s the checkpoint system. Checkpoints take the form of Short rests as they would in D&D, restoring health and total stamina (you lose total stamina over time, btw) and consumables, all of which can be forgone for the opportunity to get a higher chance of finding better quality items but at the expense of making all areas leading up to the checkpoint have enemies respawn, making it akin to a mix of the higher difficulties of Diablo’s loot game and the bonfires from the Dark Souls games. It’s a nice risk/reward dynamic that suits the game well for what it does.
But for the most part, Dungeons and Dragons Dark Alliance is just…okay. It’s not bad or great, the epitome of the middle of the road. I can very easily see what the game is trying to do, and see that it’s very obviously punching about its weight class to do it and I can kind of respect that? It just wants to be a co-op dungeon crawling hack-n-slash where you can get sick loot ala Diablo, but in a D&D context and that’s great on paper. It’s just that there’s that aforementioned jank (mostly that in the way of camera and animation weirdness) that gets in the way of things.
And then I played with some of my friends and the game got infinitely more entertaining. We were getting off team attacks, prioritizing more targets based on what was being played by who, and even the jank helped us by way of being silly in a way that we could all laugh at. My favorite example is when the game crashed on my friend Nabeel, which led to him peeking at a small piece of the game’s source code. I was laughing my head off for a good five minutes afterward. We were also cracking jokes, talking, and overall just having a good time and it’s a feeling that a lot of games (barring Destiny 2 because we get into silly bullshit there all the time) of the multiplayer variety hasn’t given me in a few years, to be honest. I appreciate it.
Dungeons and Dragons Dark Alliance isn’t going to change the world, but as a means of hanging with your friends, making jokes, and getting sick loot, i’s a good time. Plus if you’re apprehensive, get it on Game Pass if you got that. You can thank me later.
