In Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance you take the role of one of the three available characters. There is Kromlech, the Dwarven Fighter that is powerful in hand to hand combat; Adrianna, the Elven Sorceress gifted with great magical powers; Vahn, the Arcane Archer, gifted with a supernatural ability in using his arch.

The game opens with an introductory scene that reminds the beginning of the wonderful Blood Omen, the RPG that started the Legacy Of Kain series. While walking in the streets of a port city in the continent of Faerun, your character is attacked by a group of plunderers. Spoiled of your possessions and close to death, you are rescued by a Night Watchman who suggests you to recover your health in the Elfsong Tavern.

The game starts with the mission to find the plunderers and get your items back but proceding in the game you’ll get involved in a series of more dangerous quests.

Dark Alliance is set in the world of the Forgotten Realms, well-known among D&D enthusiasts. The game designers did a nice job trying to recreate the variety and the richness of the Forgotten Realms, and the strong fantasy atmosphere of the game is evident from the very beginning. The creatures taken from the D&D bestiary and the characters scattered throughout the game give an incredible breath of life to the environments of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Anyhow, while atmosphere is excellent and will excite both newcomers and veterans of the Forgotten Realms, the story is incredibly poor and uninspired. And that’s not a secondary element in a game that is supposed to bring the D&D world on a next-generation console graced by RPG series like Final Fantasy or Grandia.

During the last year, the quality of stories in videogames has reached new levels. Games like Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Final Fantasy X and also a launch title like Summoner definitely proved that videogames are able to carry on stories that overshadow the quality of many popular movies. That’s why I was expecting something more from a game set in a D&D world. D&D enthusiasts used to rich stories will be disappointed; the same will happen to all the ones used to other popular console RPGs.

As I said before, the game is defined by the developers as an “action-adventure game with RPG elements”. Gameplay wise Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance has nearly nothing in common with the magnificent PC games of the series. It plays much like a very refined version of Diablo. To make things clear, 98% of the game is based on hack and slash action through the rich environments of the game.

Proceeding in the game you’ll get new weapons and objects that will strengthen your character and you’ll gain ability points. These are necessary to learn new abilities and skills. Many abilities are available to all characters, like for example targeting and meditation. Other ones are unique to the character you’ve chosen at the beginning of the game. Of course, all the abilities are taken from the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset.

The control system is fast and intuitive, as a hack and slash game would require. The left stick is used to move your characters and the right one is used to control the camera. The main buttons are used to hit, block, jump and use magic spells and the d-pad is used to change the current weapon or spell.

The developers did a good job to create a solid control system and challenging enemies, but the game may get repetitive after a few hours. Killing thousands of zombies and skeletons for hours and hours with no evident progress in the story could cause hallucinatory effects in the player. Also the development of your character throughout the game is not exactly exciting. The items and the weapons are a few if compared to the richness of other RPGs and with little efforts you can make your Sorceress playing nearly like a Dwarven fighter. This means that the choice you have to do at the beginning of the game among the three playable characters affects the gameplay only in the first hours of the game.

Fortunately, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance is graced by the best multiplayer cooperative mode I’ve ever seen in an action RPG game. There are just a few RPGs gifted with a cooperative mode and most of the times they are nearly unplayable. But things are different with Dark Alliance. If you have a friend, a brother, a sister, a cat or a chimpanzee to play with, this is definitely one of the most addictive games available on Playstation 2. The uninspired story, the lack of varied objects and weapons to collect becomes nearly unnoticeable. The game becomes pure fun and new strategies become necessary to successfully proceed in the game.