Review by: Todd Brakke

Dungeon Siege III is not your typical Obsidian Entertainment-developed game. Obsidian games—be it Knights of the Old Republic II, Alpha Protocol, or even Fallout: New Vegas—have earned a fair reputation over the years for having a lot of brilliant ideas mixed in with poor, buggy execution. Dungeon Siege III may be the first of their games I've played that could deservingly be called a polished product. With the exception of some clunky PC controls, everything about it screams solid and stable game design. No crashes. No quests that fail to resolve properly. No characters floating through walls or heads spinning around in circles. Unfortunately, for its technical prowess, it all serves to back up a rather unremarkable game.

Dungeon Siege III is also something of a departure from the first two games. Although you do travel through most of the game with a companion (either AI-driven or a co-op partner), this isn't the sweeping party-driven PC RPG of old. This is a fairly frenetic action RPG experience, one that's clearly designed for consoles first. It's most reminiscent of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, only with a metric ton of history from the world of Ehb there to give it that extra tasty crispy Dungeon Siege flavor.

Taking place 150 years after the events of the first two games, you choose to play the role of one of four descendants of the 10th Legion. These descendants, naturally, adhere to four base character types designed to give you some variety in how you play the game: ranged, melee, mystical, or some combo thereof. In this regard the game succeeds at giving you multiple ways to play it, based on the strengths of your character and how you build her out, but it also doesn't feel like there's any wrong way to go about it, which makes your choices in character-building rather inconsequential. They pretty much all boil down to which way you go about slaughtering thousands of monsters.

Regardless of which character you choose or which companion you bring with you (they're interchangeable throughout the game), what the 10th Legion really represents isn't entirely clear in the game, which isn't good considering how important their part is. That they were part bad ass army, part keepers of the peace is clear, but in the aftermath of their fall, so much lip service is paid to the importance of legionnaire descendants that the game implies some measure of mystical importance to their bloodline that's never fully explained. That said, if you can buy the premise, the game spins an interesting yarn with enough twists and beats to it to keep you interested in where it's going next. Is the Legion actually guilty of past wrongs that have set the plot in motion? Do you spare a powerful man's life in the hopes of using that power or do you turn him over to pay for his crimes?

It's all interesting enough and it provides adequate motivation to keep you playing, but as you go about opposing the game's primary antagonist, Jeyne Kassynder, it becomes clear that the illusion of choice the game offers is paper thin. The decision points are obvious and although you're occasionally presented with an option that has no clear answer, closing epilogue aside (which is great), it never feels like any choice you make has consequences within the framework of the actual game. In terms of interweaving threads and variable outcomes, this is no Alpha Protocol.

One trait it does have in common with that game, however, is some awfully shoddy PC controls. Although not quite as broken as Alpha Protocol's, Obsidian made the rather bizarre design decision to tie camera control to the A and D keys (traditionally reserved for movement, along with W and S), with movement driven primarily by the mouse (traditionally used to control the camera). I don't know what could possibly have convinced them this was a good idea, but it just flat doesn't work. The camera is never quite where you want it and frequently it ends up positioned in the least desirable place to actually see what's going on in combat and rotating it back around again is painfully slow when surrounded by creatures of ill will. Ranged characters in particular have a hard time maintaining their distance from adversaries and still be able to see and attack them. The saving grace here is that if you have a gamepad you can plug in to your PC, the worst of these issues are largely mitigated. That said, neither of the two available camera positions are particularly effective at letting you see what lies in front of you. It's hard to fathom how that got through play testing.