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Underground monotony

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: April 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Boring. That's the best description I can come up with. Let's walk through a hole in the ground killing everything we see. Game play is far too linear. No real choice about quests or where you can go. No choice of character type (race, class, etc.).

What a joke

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 16
Date: June 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I spent like 20 hours or something obscene and finally got a pack mule. Then some guy came by and said "nice donkey" and KILLED it.

It was boring just getting to that point, but after that happened, the game was pretty pointless. What a waste of time. It would be like building a stack of cards, only to have some guy walk by, smash it, then you start over.

Summary of the game - kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.....(many moons later)....kill, kill, kill, ending (all with a crappy interface).

If you ordered this, mark the box return to sender and get your money back.

In search of

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 8
Date: April 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Has anyone found a Strategy Guide for Legends of Aranna?

Mindless hacking

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: October 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Like other reviewers here, I enjoyed the original DS. The visuals and the (admittedly thin but still fun) story line kept things going nicely. This expansion, however, seems to have expanded on the stupid parts of the game (endless hack and slash til you want to puke), and made the story line and character development weaker than the original. My vote would be: keep the great visuals and puzzles but give us a real story line. Give us only 6 gazillion monsters to kill instead of 100 million gazillion, and make it interesting for heaven's sake.

One step forward and two back

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 34 / 45
Date: February 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

It's real obvious that this is an 'expansion' and not a sequel. The gameplay is EXACTLY the same. While more of Dungeon Siege isn't a bad thing, THIS much more does get kind of repetitive, especially when you kill the 4 billionth skag/skitter/
skitterskag. It's fun to begin with but it soon becomes infuriating.

There's pretty much no reason to use anything but melee weapons during the whole game. Magic is totally useless and up until the last level, range weapons are pathetic too. And just after the halfway mark you can just forget about collecting gold. It's pointless. I finished the game with about 500, 000 in gold. But there's nothing to use it on. Why even have gold to collect if you can't use it? And the weapons and armour you can buy with it are just rubbish. They don't give you much of an upgrade or boost. They just look different from each other. There's nothing of any great use.

The controls desperately need rethought. You click in one direction and sometimes the characters will run away in the other. What's the deal with that? And it's far too, way too easy to get lost. You spend hours wandering around the labyrinthine levels without a clue where you should go. There's a megamap button on the screen but when you click on it you are presented with a black rectangle. Wow! That's useful.

There's not much of a pay-off when you finish the game either. Once you kill the bad guy you just switch the game off as there is nothing left to do. Boy, am I glad I stuck it out to the end.

The good parts are just the re-used elements of the first game. The music is great (why is there no score CD?). The plot developments are interesting (tho they go nowhere) and there is a great atmosphere to many of the exotic levels.

My best hint in regards to playing the game is to NOT allow Nardulo to join your team. He's weak, dies easily and will use up all your health potions.

Is this worth getting if you already have the first game? Definitely not! But the original Dungeon Siege is included in the 3-disc pack (no switching the CDs is necessary, the whole game is loaded all at once-quite impressive!!!) so if you really love bashing in goblins and love it just as much after bashing the 50 zillionth, gillionth, thrillionth, trillionth, billionth, millionth goblin then go right ahead and play both games in a row. I can't imagine it would be healthy tho.

3-D copy of Diablo II but not as much fun

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: January 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I got this expansion pack for xmas and have played it a total of about ten hours thus far. It's a pretty good game, heavily derivative of Diablo II, but it has some fairly significant flaws.

Pros:

1. Big expansive world;
2. Lots of different types of weapons, spells and armor;
3. Large inventory plus ability to expand it significantly with a pack animal;
4. When character's health drops to zero, he/she becomes unconscious rather than dead and can be revived;
5. Pretty decent graphics;
6. Can customize looks of your character, including gender, hair colors/styles and clothes.

Cons:

1. Combat is automated, so once you get within either your missile range or the myopic monsters' sight range, the computer takes over, fights to the death and the player has very little impact on the fight. In fact, the only real task given to the player during all combat scenes is to monitor the health and mana levels of the party and drink health and mana potions before falling unconscious. Combat is thus really boring.

2. The automap function sucks. It only gives you a limited top down map that does not show much area. In contrast, the automapping function in Diablo II shows the map of the full area, making backtracking easier. It's easy to get lost in the game and waste a lot of time hunting around for that passage back to the nearest town.

3. It's too easy to click on one of the other party members by accident during combat when trying to reposition a character, which makes that other character the leader.

4. The program has bugs. I had one character who had stopped near a bridge with the rest of the party and it got stuck at the bridge - I couldn't get him to continue following the party or move him anywhere. I had to backtrack at least half an hour to an earlier saved game to get around this problem. Very aggravating.

Summary: Copies many aspects of Diablo II, improves some of them, but by and large, this game lacks much involvement and is considerably less fun to play.

If You Still Enjoy the Game After the 5,856th Goblin Death..

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: January 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I was never a big fan of the popular Diablo series. I was even offended when the game referred to itself as an RPG when I thought it was nothing more than hack and slash repetitiveness. So when Dungeon Siege was released with the promises of being a beautifully rendered 3-D Diablo clone, I didn't order this baby as soon as it was released even though it did have some impressive screenshots. Well, I finally gave in after the expansion game was released because unlike other expansions, Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna actually comes with the original game as well. Hey, I have no problem with a braindead game that acts as temporary mind candy. I've been through my fair share of boring shoot 'em ups, and I did have some fun for a few days with Dungeon Siege. I enjoyed upgrading my party and their skill levels. There were some great looking dungeons and plains to roam but some of them started getting boring. I have no problem with a mindless dungeon romp but after the 18,000th goblin, the game starts to get old. It also gets old when I realize that all of my equipment is the same, it just goes up in damage and armor levels. The graphics, music, audio effects and stability of this game are top notch. One of the best production values of current games, but somehow during the production of this game, the designers forgot the most important element of any video game - fun! . Another unfortunate feature of this game is while it has a BEAUTIFUL engine, nothing really ever became of the toolset and custom mod community. There are people that enjoy this game but I have no idea how close I came to completing the original game because I was bored to tears halfway through. Dungeon Siege is one of those titles that is worth it when the price drops but a game that might leave you feeling ripped off if you buy it at a current release price.

Too easy...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: April 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I'll have to agree with other reviewers. The game play is just too easy and after a while gets too monotonous. The graphics are great and the scenery/music is excellent. I enjoyed the original game much more. You had to work harder to kill the bosses and it required more strategy and interaction. In LoA, all you really need to focus on is pushing potions. The original game also includes a multiplayer map that is completely different than the single player game, which added to hours of extra enjoyment. Not so in LoA. They really skimped out on the expansion pack.
If you've never played DS before, go ahead and buy it since it includes the original. You'll love it! If you're buying this because you have DS, its probably not worth it. I'm much more excited about Dungeon Siege II after seeing the trailer. Hopefully, the game lives up to the trailer.

Pretty and boring

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: June 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Dungeon Siege: LoA is a standalone sequel to Microsoft's popular crawler. It includes both LoA and the original for a very low price that is more than reasonable. By itself, LoA utilizes the same beautiful graphics engine made popular in the first game with some 'useful' additions. The inclusion of set items, imbued items, and individual spell hotkeys greatly enhance play over the original, but the 'enhanced' AI actually takes away from the gameplay. Now when one person in your party gets attacked, the entire party will follow. Great for defending mules, bad when you want to keep formation.
It's entirely possible to now play nearly the entire game on autopilot; the only interaction between the player and the game world being recruiting more party members or picking up your loot.

As far as Dungeon Crawlers go, this one is somehow lacking. The story is immensly weak, and as such, leaves little incentive to finish the game. Multiplayer is much the same, with the tedium broken by the incursion of special online maps and, of course, people to play with.

LoA's saving grace, however, is its ability to be easily modded. There are some exquisite mods that can be downloaded that cater to the single player and the multi-player alike. Had Gas-powered Games not included this feature, odds are Dungeon Siege wouldn't have lasted to see this sequel.

If you have and enjoy Dungeon Siege, you have to ask yourself if the relatively useless set items and new item mods are worth sinking in your hard-earned money to the game. If you are new to the series, at least this game includes the original so you'll be getting two campaigns that will provide a few hours of playtime. Just make sure to check out some fan-site and pick yourself up a good mod to further your investment.

disappointed

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 18
Date: September 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Unfortunately this game is rated as working on the XP. The expansion does work on the XP. And is very good. The reason I don't rate the game higher is that the origional Dungeon Seige starts working, but then around the mid point it crashes. It replaces the screen with squares of green. Once they appear, nothing can be done. I E-mailed Microsoft and the developers and they insisted that I just had to erase the game from the computer and then reload the game onto the computer. It then crashed the same way. I gave up after three crashes. But as I say, the expansion does work and is quite fun. The main game is also fun until it crashes.

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