A Flawed but Enjoyable Experience
I played the first first Dungeon Siege and it expansion and enjoyed those games quite a lot I never got around to playing DS 2, but regardless this game is extremely different than the first two.
Note: I just kind of grabbed these images from the site, I did not take any of these images.
Gameplay
The game is an action RPG, sort of similar to Fable and Dragon Age, on the 360 controller you press A to do the basic attacks and the other face buttons are mapped to special skills and abilities. The combat does feel extremely strange at first, everything feels pretty loose I guess, lots of pretty sweet animations to the spells and abilities but sometimes it doesn't seem like anything is making contact with the enemy.
You can play as 4 pre-made characters, a mage, a knight, a huntress (with GUNS!!!) and a demon lady. They each feel very unique and imo they all seem to have some pretty nice spells and abilities. On my first playthrough I played as the mage and his traps and spells worked very well. Each of the characters have three stances which change the abilities mapped to your face button, the stances are single target stance, area of effect stance, and defensive stance for healing, shields etc...
The camera is absolutely atrocious, instead of doing the normal isometric view thing it will insist to sometimes zoom up on you at always the worst times, usually when your stuck in a corner in the middle of combat. Maybe Obsidian wanted the camera to zoom in sometimes for special effects? I dont know the point is its really really bad.
Story
You play as one of the last remaining sons and daughters of the Legion, an organization founded to protect the kingdom of Ehb but that was destroyed 30 years ago, now it is time to reunite the Legion and right the world.
It starts off pretty generic fantasy stuff but surprisingly this is where the game truly shines, I loved this story. Each of the four playable characters has a backstory and they each fit into the larger story very well. There are some pretty cool callbacks to the first dungeon siege that I recognized. The twists in the story line are very interesting and you do get to make some pretty cool decisions that will effect how the game ends.
The only negative is that the voice acting is extremely hit or miss, sometimes the story will be moving along everything is going great and then I go talk to a characer and his voice is terrible. Like most Obsidian games there are some great jokes in this game, I chuckled at a few of the one liners. Also, the demon playable character, Anjali looks extremely cool but her voice acting sounds very strange, I played as her in the demo and decided for my actual playthrough to pick someone else because I did not like the way she sounds.
Content
This is the weakest part of the game. I finished in about 13 hours on normal difficulty and there just isnt much to do in this game. There are some side quests but with the exception of about two, they are mostly just "kill this guy", "fetch this thing" type of quests. I will say that for 13 hours the enemy variety is very impressive also the locations are extremely varied, I would have just liked more stuff to do in these locations because I enjoyed being in them.
There is multiplayer but it is Fable 2 style, you can not bring your own character in. I have been playing it off and on when I am bored I will just join a random game to kill an hour or so. So basically the multiplayer is almost worthless, there is two player local co-op and you can take your guest online and play with two other people but again you cant save your characters. Also the camera in multiplayer for some reason still decides to keep everyone on the same screen, even if all 4 people are on different consoles, this is extremely lazy development.
Graphics
IMHO, I like how this game looks, I have heard many people complain about this game's graphics and I am not sure if I am missing something, like I said there are a lot of environmental all look great. And I am very impressed with the spell animations and effects. The game doesn't seem to be designed for 4 people over the internet so it will jug during big battles.
Bottom Line
There is not much coming out this summer, I got this game for $60 because I was mostly bored and I was interested in the storyline which at least the game delivered on that. If your looking for a RPG to fill out the summer and dont have high expectations I would recommend this game. For old players of DS1 and DS2 if you can let go and try something different but set in the same universe you might enjoy being part of the legion again.
