Badlur's Gate: Dark Alliance was an ok game, but it got repetitive
really quick and it was extremely short. The story was lame, the world
map was lame, and there was a bunch of other things that annoyed me.
The Gamespot review of this game bugged me because I didn't suffer
through any framerate problems, but I only played it on normal on
single player, so things might be different in a harder mode. Other
than that, I would suggest the X-Men Legend series for a better beat-em
up, dungeon crawling, and multiplayer experience.
----------Battle System----------
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is a generic hack and slasher / Dungeon
Crawler that does little to advance the genre at all. Basically you
pick between an archer, magic caster or fighter and then go on a simple
repetitive quest, that requires you to fight through a ton of enemies
through an almost randomly generated dungeon that feels like a maze,
but always ends up feeling linear once you get the map unsolved.
When you level up you get points to distribute between skills, and
sometimes (rarely) get points to distribute to your status effects
(like power, magic, etc). You have a weight limit with your items, so
you'll be constantly warping back to a save area selling off junk. I
played the game with the Archer and never learned a bit of magic, so I
was always wasting space with magic bottles I kept picking up.
Other than that, there's not much to talk about this battle system, because that's basically it.
----------Characters / Story----------
You start the game by picking between a Human Archer, Dwarf Fighter or
Elf Magic Caster. Each game starts and I'll assume ends the same way.
All the playable character dialog you pick through is simple questions
and nothing said by them give off any personality. The story is weak
and boring.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are
very good for this type of game, but overall pretty weak considering
how small of a game it was and so few level designs. The character and
enemy models look great, and I loved the water and lighting effects.
Gamespot noted several times in their Gamecube review that this game
suffers from an extreme framerate problem, however I didn't notice this
at all. You can't zoom with the camera, so that was disappointing.
----------Sound----------
The voice actors are good, however the production of them are terrible.
The music is louder than the voices most of the and I always have to
turn the TV up when there's a speaking part, and I still have a tough
time understanding everything. The music is ambient and quiet, it fits
the game as a whole. Other than the offset of the voices there's
nothing to bad about the sound.
----------World Map----------
The world map is small and only seen between chapters when you warp to
new lands. The game as a whole is just 2 towns and 1 other save spot.
There's only a few people in the entire game you're able to talk to,
and only one save house you're allowed to enter. The entire game is one
big sewer level, mountain level and swamp level with a castle thrown in
at the end. The only other map you can view in the game that's useful
is the dungeon map that tracks your every move and shows which
directions you need to go. If this map didn't exist then I would get
lost alot. You can warp back to your previous safe spot with a Recall
bottle, other than that you can't really travel back once your get past
a chapter.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
7:53
After you beat the game you unlock Gauntlet Mode, which is just a
'survive the dungeon without saves' mini quest. If you beat that then
you unlock a new Extreme difficulty, then finally if you beat that you
unlock a new character. That's the only replay value this game offers
other than multiplayer mode, or to play as a different character but
neither sounds interesting to me.
