Dungeons & Dragons Tactics Reviews Part 1

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So soon after release it's hardly a surprise that a few reviews are up and about for DDT, but tonight we have no less than five reviews for you to catch up on. (Apologies for the lateness on a couple of them, it's been hectic at news central this week!)

First up tonight is a review from RPG Fan, rating the game rather generously with an overall 78%. Here's a clip:

When you first begin D&D Tactics, you will need to create a party. You can create as many characters you wish (including 0) from scratch, and you'll have to choose one of them as your main character. You even have the option of choosing to "quickstart" and have the game generate your entire party of six for you. In my experiments with that option, the game seemed to create a well-rounded party, so if you're not interested in going through the time-consuming task of creating your own characters, feel free to let the game do the work for you. If you're not familiar with D&D but want to create your own characters anyway, the game does a pretty decent job of explaining what each of your choices grants you, but it does so using D&D terminology, so keep the game's manual (and maybe a D&D rules website) handy during the process. If you are a long-time D&D player, you will want to know that characters are restricted to one class, and that the Ranger class has been stripped of some of its abilities in a way that may leave some fans very unhappy. I actually dropped my Ranger after a while because there were only a few maps early on where using ranged weapons was very important. I swapped her for a Rogue and was almost immediately sad that I hadn't included a Rogue from the beginning.

Here's the link for that piece. Second up on the slab today is a review from PAL Gaming Network, awarding the game with a more standard 5.5/10, calling it "too slow and restrictive". Take a look:

Fundamentally, the game works quite well. There have been reports of unsolicited and unreported rule changes, but that won’t be all that noticeable. Like Metal Gear Acid, Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics does an astute job of representing its franchise in a different way. Unfortunately, there are a couple of aspects to that game that don’t it any favours. While you’ll spend a lot of time in battle, there is a lot of menu driven party management. Given that this is such a prevalent aspect of the game, we would have expected them to be more accessible and easier to navigate. There’s no simple way to say it other than they’re a real pain in the backside.

This spills over to the actual game. Navigating through the menus while in the actual game becomes a real chore, and in turn, adversely affects the pacing of the game. While most missions are relatively short, and you can save almost any time, dragging through the menus and the pacing of the action is very sluggish and can become very unappealing. Simply put, it can get really boring.

Clicky.

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