As a veteran of the SSI's wonderful AD&D Gold Box series, Dungeons & Dragons Tactics sounds like a godsend of a game for the PSP. The game is billed as an authentic D&D experience set in the Forgotten Realms using the the 3.5 ruleset. And while it does at least accomplish that -- almost to a fault --- it does so in a way that is cumbersome, uninformative and frustrating to the player.
The biggest problem with D&D Tactics is that it adheres to the rule set painstakingly in some areas and in other areas it omits the most of the basic tenets of the system. Top this off with an interface that at best would be called sloppy and you have the makings for an RPG experience that just isn't all that fun.
But D&D Tactics' biggest sin is the interface that thwarts progress at every turn and at every conceivable moment. Everything is buried under a series of badly organized menus, which branch off to other menus and on and on to the points of insanity. This makes the simplest of tasks difficult. But that's not the only problem with the interface that you'll encounter. Beyond that multi-layer of menus is the way that the game goes out of its way to make simple task difficult. This frustration begins the moment you begin creating a party. Instead of letting you stay within the "create a character" menu you are pushed out to the main menu after creating each character. While this may seem like a small nuisance, when you have to continually navigate back to the same areas multiple time it becomes slightly frustrating. This is pretty much how the entire interface is set up in the game. The only part of the game that isn't taxing is navigating the 2D map as you progress through the main campaign.
And this frustrating system extends itself to the combat as well. As you navigate through your feats, movement, attacks and other skills you'll notice just how badly everything is organized. A lot of these sections should be organized better but they just are thrown together to add more confusion to the play. Once you accept the you'll have to sift through these menus, the game can be fun, but again, there are serious design problems that make the combat -- the heart of the game -- feel more like work than fun.
A good example of this is how you move when on the combat field. Movement is actually turn-based - even before you have an encounter. In this day and age it just doesn't make sense to have movement set up this way. And when you move in this non-combat phase to explore you'll have to move everyone until something happens. Even the Gold Box games had movement phases where everyone moved. If you weren't in an encounter then you explored in a first-person perspective. Implementing a movement system like this in a game for the sake of authenticity is just a bad idea when it slows down the pace of the game..
When you do have an encounter and finally get to the point where you can use all those nifty feats, spells and class skills you'll figure out that this game gives you zero information on what's going on. Did you fail to turn undead with your cleric? Miss your target with the magic missile spell? Couldn't smash that Orc with your mace? Unable to move well because of encumbrance? Well you'll never know why these things fail or succeed because the game gives you no information on these kinds of things as they happen. What's the point of worrying about what your any of your stats or modifiers are when the game doesn't show you what affect all of this has?
