Dungeon Siege II: First Impressions

I’ve played about an hour of the DS2 demo and you may color me less than impressed.

The graphics in the demo are improved over the first DS for sure, but they’re still pretty much crap. I was surprised how crappy the graphics were, in fact. Fate had better graphics, IMHO. The characters were low-polygon affairs that shared the same basic look and feel as the models from the first game. Actually, it looks like they may have just copied the models straight over. Spell effects are nothing new. You’ve seen them all in Diablo 2 and Neverwinter Nights.

Game-play wise, it’s the same tired gameplay that was in the first one. Linear maps that take you pretty much from point a to point b, oh look, a mini-map, so now it’s even easier to follow the linear maps. They could’ve just removed the movement controls and made a pretty decent rail shooter.

The story seems somewhat cliche but is not entirely devoid of interest. *yawn* another evil guy gets powerful by means of some ancient artifact and tries to track down more artifacts. Blah blah blah. I’ve played this game. It was called Diablo 2.

So, yeah, I’m a little cynical about DS2, especially because it feels less like a sequel and more like an expansion pack or a user-created mod of the first game.

Maybe the editing tools will be decent this time around. I doubt it.