Game Review: Dungeon Siege II

The game Dungoen Siege II (DS2) is one of the few games noteworthy of actually getting my attention. Most games in my opinion are just yet another rehash of another rehash of some clone of some other game.

Some people say that DS2 is a Diablo 2 killer. Based on what I have seen it comes close but doesn't yeat beat Diablo 2.

DS2 is using an enhanced engine of the original Dungeon Siege. The expansion pack made it nice. Many character and design flaws, as well as the annoying level-up problems were fixed.

The scenery is quite nice, but it starts becoming repetitive at times. DS2 has got main quests and sub quests. The sub quests let the player do a lot of backtracking between Acts 1 to 3, which gets rather annoying. The information given in some of the sub quests is also a bit too vague. Certain sub quests only become available with having certain characters in the party.

A new feature is the specialities and the associated powers which recharge during combat. The monster AI has been improved a lot, but the monsters aim a bit too much for the combat mage all of the time. The player and party AI seems to have become more stupid and degraded. There are bugs where weapons do not show when held, and spells (Transmute in particular) don't seem to always function.

A new feature are the pets that can be developed, once they are fully grown, the pets are not as much fun anymore, but they become quite powerful. The spells are also just repeats (lesser, greater, master), sicne they are just different-powered version of the same thing. The design flaw were a spell cannot be used later on since the mana is suddenly not enough anymore has fortunately been removed.

Another good thing is the fact that the difficulty selection has been done like Diablo 2, and the character level is now shown ingame.

The 3D graphics and scenery have been improved, the story as well and fortunately no undead since that topic became quite stale.
For any game the following applies: Good graphics does not mean that the game is good no matter what the artificial hype says.
In the case of DS2, the graphics actually complements the game.

Good advice: don't run DS2 with non WHQL compliant video drivers, otherwise there will be some very interesting graphical glitches.

Overall, the game is great, this is the closest that any game got to Diablo 2.