Dark Alliance II is a bland unoriginal dungeon hack.
Ok, this is basically the same game as the original, with little to no improvements. The only actual improvements I can thing of are the graphics, but it's such a small improvement that it doesn't matter. The world map is slightly better aswell.. but that's all I can thing of. This game falls into the same repetitive mess of a trap that all dungeon hacks fall into. It has a terrible story, cheap graphics, boring combat and an insulting level designs.
----------Battle System----------
Dark Alliance 2 is an top-down dungeon hack rpg. At the start of the game you get to pick between 5 extremely generic avatars. I picked the Barbarian guy.
Quest's range from: Go to Point A to Point B, to Go to Point B to Point C, while killing everything in sight. Uh, there's not much of a variation in quests. From the first dungeon to the last, they're all basically the same, no new puzzles or anything. The only thing different is the scenary, you have a sewer, a cave, a castle, a forest, a snowy area.. uh.. that's it.
You gain a small amount of experience for each monster killed, but a ton of experience for each completed quest or boss killed. After each level you get to distribte points to skills you want to learn. There's only about 4 or 5 skills that you use in a battle as attacks or spells (atleast with my Barbarian character). You can hotkey these skills with the L trigger, but these skills are usally worthless and I hardly used them.
There's only one shop in the entire game. He only changes his supplies after each Act (4 in total). You can power up your weapons or armor by finding or buying gems. You have to warp back to Baldur's Gate and get the shopkepper to forge them to your weapons or armor for a boost.
You have a weight limit with what you can carry, like the first game. The enemy-item drop rate isn't nearly as bad as the first game, and not even on the same universe as Champions of Norrath but it can still be annoying once you reached your limit. After you can't carry anymore items, all you have to do is "Recall" (aka warp) back into town and sell all the crap you picked up, then warp back to your last spot. It's simple, but entirely a waste of time.
----------Characters / Story----------
Story? You don't need no stinking story. Atleast that's what the developers thought. The game takes place right after the first game, and there's some bad guys trying to retake Baldur's Gate and revive the Onyx Tower or some crap like that. The story is terrible.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are slightly more improved over the original, but not by much. In contrast, this game looks slightly worse than Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes but slightly better than Fallout: Brotherhood of Man, if you've played either of those. All cutscenes use the game engine, so they tend to look like crap. There's a few cutscenes that use the game engine but are touched up a hair, but they still aren't impressive by any means. The game is really dark, most dungeons are a chore to fight through because of how dark they are.
----------Sound----------
The music is rehashed from the first game, so that's a big no-no. The voice work is ok, but nothing to write home about.
----------World Map----------
There's an actual world map in this game, I'm shocked. The map is a dot-to-dot map, like Mario Bros 3. The new areas unlock after certain points in the game and you can backtrack to older areas, but after so long they tend to disappear. The game is much more open-ended than the first game or even Champions of Norrath, but you're still fairly limited after a while.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
10:53
Short game, but about an average length for these styled games. After you beat it you get to view a set up for the next game, which I'm praying is never made.
