The Kingdom of Ehb has seen better days. The 10th Legion, the descendants of the Farmer, the first hero of Ehb has been decimated by a Joan of Arc style firebrand by the name of Jeyne Kassynder. Ehb is split between the Royalists who support the young queen and Kassynder's zealots who see her as a living saint. Armies rage across the land and ancient enemies stir. As one of the surviving children of 10th Legion blood, it's the player's responsibility to defeat Kassynder, uncover the truth about what caused her to want to annihilate the Legion in the first place, unite the country and bring the Legion back from the brink. No pressure.

Players take the role of one of four characters descended from Legion blood, Lucas Montbarron, a knight skilled in melee combat, Anjali, and Archon able to switch between human and fire elemental forms, Reinhart Manx, a mage and Katarina, a witch skilled with guns and curses. Although the other characters become available throughout the game to use as companions, the player is limited to playing a single character.

Without a doubt the strongest element of the game is the synergy between basic combat abilities, special attack and defensive abilities. Basic attacks cause the characters to generate Focus – the Dungeon Siege III equivalent of mana – a resource that is used to pull off special attacks. Special attacks help generate Power, a separate resource used to trigger healing, defensive and buffing abilities. Power is also used to fuel Empowered abilities – powerful versions of the special skills that are unlocked after they've been used enough times. It's a simple but very elegant system that really encourages you to use all of your abilities rather than just spamming the one button constantly.

The entire combat system is based around simplicity and keeping the action flowing. There's no pausing or need for tactical commands, just frantic combinations of special abilities, basic attacks, blocks and dodges. Each character has two combat stances – one for range and one for melee, or in the case of Lucas, one for single combat and one for groups. Players can switch between these at any time, and each stance has access to three special abilities. In many ways it feels more like a third person action game with RPG trappings rather than a more traditional action RPG. That's not a bad thing.

Unfortunately the simplicity and accessibility that is so good in combat also influences the character design and progression. Each of the four characters has access to nine special abilities that are unlocked as the character levels. Aside from choosing the order in which they are unlocked, players have no real choice over the skills. The only palpable choices come with the secondary abilities that are linked to the special skills. Each of these skills has two secondary attributes; for example, Heartseeking Shot, one of Katarina's powerful rifle attacks, can be specced to have a chance to ricochet between targets or to regenerate some focus each time it is used. Up to five skill points can be put into either of these secondary abilities or divided between the two. Each character also has 12 passive abilities that can have points allocated to them.


Things that go SHAZAM in the night.
It sounds a lot deeper than it actually is. It's an effective and very approachable character development system but it's also very restrictive. No matter how you choose to allocate your skill points there is only minor variation in how the characters play, and even then things are more determined by gear than they are by abilities. Gear is randomised in the traditional prefix-suffix RPG way – Swift Rapier of Vampirism – and is plentiful. The random nature of the gear means that you might not be able to equip your character to play in the manner you specced it. You may spec Katarina for high critical damage and rifle skills, but unless you get lucky with agility based gear you'll be hamstrung.

During the single player campaign, players are joined by an AI companion. These companions help out immeasurably in fights, but the AI isn't always the most reliable. Ranged companions like Katarina or Reinhart are as likely to run into melee as they are to use their more powerful ranged attacks, and the melee characters are seemingly incapable of keeping mobs away from the player. The drop-in, drop-out multiplayer fixes this problem for the most part – humans are far better players than the AI – but brings with it some unique frustrations. Only the host actually benefits from multiplayer; anyone else playing is forced to play one of the host's companions, and outside of a few achievements or trophies there is no reward – you can't take any loot or experience or progression back to your own game. For a game all about loot and experience it's a pretty major oversight.

There are also a few technical issues that can get in the way of fun at times. The auto-targeting for ranged attacks is erratic, sometimes focussing on the wrong target or no target at all, even when you're surrounded by enemies. The camera also has a tendency to the claustrophobic which doesn't help matters of aim. Still, it's a stable and bug free game. That may sound like a bit of a backhanded compliment, but, you know, it is an Obsidian game.

It sounds like a lot of complaining but despite it all, Dungeon Siege III is a strangely satisfying game. It has a pleasantly uninspired story, some fun encounters and a very approachable combat system. It's not a deep RPG experience by any means, and you won't give a hoot about any of the two-dimensional characters, but that was never really the purpose of the game. Dungeon Siege III is an old-school hack and slash game with some newfangled gloss, fun but forgettable.

Will you be revisiting the delights of Dungeon Siege III, or are you waiting for that other action RPG due to hit some time soon?

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