Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes

Added March 22nd, 2004 by Sallizar

Introduction:

It’s rare that I’ve Dungeon Mastered a game of the pencil and paper roleplaying version of Dungeons and Dragons with less than four players. So, when Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance came out for the Xbox with support for only two players I was a bit confused. I mean, if Gauntlet can support four players how come we can’t get a Dungeons and Dragons licensed game that will let four souls adventure together. Well, the gaming gods heard my plea and bestowed Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes on Xbox gamers. Grab your sword and your spellbook. We’re going monster hunting.

Gameplay:

Ahh, the generic RPG storyline. You and three of your friends will be portraying four heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice to contain a great evil. Many thousands of years have passed and some dumb as a rock clerics “accidentally” revive the great evil. So, they figure “Hey, if we can revive that evil thing we can surely revive these four dead folks too”. There’s nothing better than being brought back to life just to fix someone else’s screw-up. After you get over the “just raised from the dead” hangover, you’ll hack and slash your way through various different areas, gradually powering up your character to ensure they’ll be ready to face the evil yet again. Maybe this time, you’ll live to tell about it.

As you progress through the game, your character will gain access to a wide variety of skills. To choose which skills the character will use, pull the right trigger. A menu will appear by your characters portrait and health meter allowing you to assign various commands to the X, Y and B buttons. The neat part is that this is all done on the fly during the heat of battle. When the right trigger is pulled, the game enters a slow motion mode. While you’re futzing around picking a spell that will actually hurt the fire monster instead of reviving his health, your cohorts will still be hacking away at the enemy. Implementing this menu system eliminates the start and stop gameplay that hamper many other hack and slash RPGs.

Gamers will find tons of loot in D&D: Heroes. Like most RPGs, the weapons are always the best treasure. Each character will be able to buy or find better weapons specific to their class, but the most intriguing weapon is the one your character begins the game with. Each character starts with an Ancestral eapon that can be powered up by finding Soul Shards. Twenty Soul Shards are scattered throughout the game in hidden nooks and crannies. For every five you get, the weapon will change shape and increase in power. If you find all twenty, you’ll have the best weapon in the game by far.

Graphics:

Heroes sports the typical top down dungeon crawl camera that we all know and love. This brings with it a tile based design strategy for the world maps. While this is fine for dungeons crawls, the icy areas looks odd because of all the ninety degree corners. On the other hand, the treetop village area is incredibly well designed. It’s hard to tell that all the walkways and huts in that section are laid out on a grid. Character models are somewhat bland and uninspired at first, but as you upgrade armor they begin to look much better. Enemies are varied and animate pretty well overall, especially the snakemen. While it by no means pushes the Xbox hardware, there are a sprinkling of various graphical effects on spells and special attacks. The only thing is, you’ll rarely see them because you’ll have the screen zoomed so far out. Overall, the entire presentation is polished and does a good job of immersing the player.

Audio:

Nothing really stands out about the audio in Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes. The small amount of voice acting is well done and sparse enough that it doesn’t get repetitive. The heroes grunt and groan during combat, and surprisingly it’s not cheesy at all. Various monsters hiss and snarl convincingly, but it doesn’t strike terror into my heart. While the musical score fits the generic fantasy sound you’d expect from this type of game, I doubt you’ll be humming it in the shower. To top it off you get to hear all this mediocrity in 5.1 surround sound. There’s really nothing wrong with the audio in D&D: Heroes, it’s just not mind-blowing.

Controls:

D&D: Heroes has a fantastic control setup. My favorite part is the right trigger slow-motion menu that gives you the ability to change your button assignments on the fly. It helps keep the game flowing instead of bogging it down by forcing the other players to wait while someone pauses the game and chooses what they want assigned. The only minor gripe I have is the ability for all players to control the camera. This really hurts a player with mostly ranged attacks. For example, Player 1 lines up a perfect arrow shot, when suddenly Player 2 spins the camera view just as Player 1 lets fly. The arrow goes flying down the corridor completely missing the monsters. I can’t begin to describe the amount of conflict this caused in my living room. Just remember to cooperate and it won’t be a problem.

Left Thumbstick - Character Movement
Right Thumbstick - Adjust Camera
Click Right Thumbstick - Display Map
Start – Pause/Save and Options Menu
Back - Character Status Screen
A – Basic Attack
B – Item - User Definable
X – Action 1 – User Definable
Y – Action 2 – User Definable
White - Health Potion
Black - Mystical Will Potion
Left Trigger - Block
Right Trigger - Press and hold, then use the DPad to select the action and/or item for to assign to buttons B, X and Y.

Replay:

If you’re looking for replay value in Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes, you could start off by playing through the game as each of the four characters. Also, after you finish the game you are given the option to play through the game again using the high level characters from your final save. From the research I’ve done, there doesn’t seem to be any level cap. Theoretically, this means you should be able to max out all of the abilities for your character, and then run through in Nightmare difficulty mode reeking maximum devastation. All things considered, playing multiplayer brings the most replay value to D&D: Heroes. If you have more than one friend that likes hack and slash roleplaying, then Heroes is going to keep you busy for quite a while.

Summary:

To me, hack and slash roleplaying is a guilty pleasure. Nothing is more fun than mindlessly mowing through a group of enemies just to do it all over again. D&D: Heroes takes that one step further by letting you play with three of your closest friends. Well, until your so-called closest friends start grabbing all the gold while you’re fighting the enemy. If you liked Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance than I have feeling you and your two left out friends are going to have a lot of fun with Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes.