Review by: Brandon "Healing Word" Cackowski-Schnell

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Dungeons & Dragons Daggerdale is a horribly, horribly broken game. The single player is broken, the online co-op is broken to the point where different bugs pop up depending on whether you’re hosting or joining. This game should not be purchased in its current state, and if patched, only after enough research has been done to ensure that the bugs are fixed.

So, what kind of bugs can you expect to see during your play time? Well, there’s a bug that strips away most, if not all of your abilities, taking away whatever skill points you spent on them in the process. My co-op partner and I hit this one shortly before starting the final boss battles, which couldn’t be a more inconvenient time to lose your super powers. There’s a bug that randomly switches your inventory items around when you sell things so that you accidentally sell items you wanted to keep. There’s a bug that makes items repeat throughout your inventory making it impossible to equip or sell anything. There’s a bug that makes certain elements of the game appear to only one co-op player. In our case, “certain elements” meant the final boss which, at the risk of spoiling the game, is a giant dragon. Yes, that’s right, the game is so broken it made a giant dragon disappear. From the game’s beginning moments with dead enemies that are still standing, and gold that mysteriously floats above the ground to the end where you and your partner are unceremoniously dumped into the beginning level with all of your controller button mapping information mysteriously missing, it’s just a giant, bug filled mess.

Truth be told, even if the game ran perfectly, Daggerdale has enough in it to be a somewhat enjoyable co-op romp, but plenty of dated design choices make it less than fun for single players, or people looking for a more modern experience. Quests are of two varieties: either go someplace and kill things, or go someplace and find things. Don’t worry though, as you have to kill things before you can find things. You can’t have more than one quest active at a time, so even though two quests may have you traipsing through the same dank cave system, you can’t accomplish more than one thing at a time, leading to a bunch of backtracking through endlessly respawning enemies.

The respawning enemies thing isn’t so bad as it gives you the chance to get more experience and more loot, however the loot you get isn’t all that great and the experience you get won’t allow you to level up to the game’s level 10 cap, even if you do everything. I’m not very familiar with the 4th edition D&D rules, but I have to hope that character leveling is more exciting than this. Each of the four pregenerated characters only have a handful of special abilities, many of which are locked until you level up sufficiently, and while you can add feats with every other level, many of them are useless for your character, or useless for any character. When a game has a level cap of 10 levels, every level should make you feel like you’re getting something new but in this game, frequently your options are limited to simply adding points to a power you already have, which doesn’t make you feel any different. Well, until the powers get taken away. Then you feel very, very different.

I am a huge fan of co-op games, and believe very strongly in the notion that a poor game can be made better by having someone else to play it with, but Daggerdale isn’t just a poor game, it’s a frustrating, shoddy, broken mess of a game that never should have been released in its current state, made even more upsetting by the fact that you have no recourse to get your money back. Do not buy this game.