Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a tedious co-op adventure with lots of goblins and even more bugs.

The Dark Alliance revival lacks finesse, and local co-op, but give it time and it's not without its own charms.

A furiously entertaining action RPG whose horrible monsters are a delight to slay, whether you're playing solo or co-op.

In missions, players have two options upon clearing set areas, which are to increase the rarity of loot that will drop, or to rest at camp, which will create a checkpoint for the player and restore any used healing items. On the Legendary and Ascended difficulty - the final two tiers of difficulty the game offers - I would spend most of these instances resting at camp to refill my resources, because enemies at this level, be they goblins or frenzied psionic cultists, would simply evaporate my health with a single strike. That was also a normal occurrence if my character's power level did not meet the suggested requirement of the selected difficulty.

Hacking and slashing with friends is always fun, but Dark Alliance has too many problems to recommend when so many other cooperative experiences offer more

I wrack my brain trying to figure out Dark Alliance’s strengths, and I’m not coming up with much. The level design works surprisingly well for multiplayer. I was afraid looting would fall by the wayside, but every time a fight would wrap up, everyone would run off in different directions and grab chests before finally moving on. I didn’t feel like things were getting missed. Well, except for the shoes that would pop out of chests some other player would open. Those just rot, forgotten on the ground.

Dark Alliance is a game that seems destined to be forgotten, which is a shame because there's a lot of old-school PS2-style fun to be had. Once split screen is patched in we can see ourselves going back to it regularly in order to relive those couch co-op days of yore, though the game is enjoyable solo as well if you choose your difficulty setting wisely. It's nothing to set the world on fire but it's a perfectly enjoyable throwback to dungeon crawling hack-and-slash classics that'll work for you all the more if you've got a group of friends who yearn to go back in time to a simpler experience. Future content updates will only improve Dark Alliance and we'd urge you to give it a try for yourself.

If you are a long time D&D player or have played any fantasy action brawlers in the past, you’ll likely enjoy this game – either with friends, or even if you go for the more challenging route of playing alone. It certainly doesn't revolutionise the genre, but considering it’s available on Game Pass at launch, there’s no reason not to give it a go. There’s also some free DLC and a paid expansion on the way, giving Dark Alliance a chance to level up in the future.

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a game with great promise but poor-to-mediocre performance, depending on your affinity for action-oriented loot hunting and patience for AI and other technical shortcomings that should have been nipped in beta. But with promise comes optimism; Tuque Games has a robust DLC and expansion roadmap planned, so its continued investment in the game could lead to patches ameliorating my gripes. If it does, you’ll find that Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance reaches the lofty heights of its renowned spiritual predecessors. But if Tuque Games neglects these issues, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance will remain a fun but prohibitively frustrating game I can recommend to series devotees and few others.

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance delivers a solid D&D adventure, with exciting combat and a slew of monsters to take down. Though my experience was a bit dulled by crashes and some minor bugs, it certainly didn’t ruin the game for me. Dark Alliance fits in nicely in the pantheon of Dungeons and Dragons games.