Review: Dungeon Siege 3 (360/PS3/PC)

Enjoyable co-op features and a varied selection of playable characters highlight this dungeon crawler, but it's still hampered by overly complex controls, some strange gameplay choices, and poor audio.

In the time of Diablo, Dungeon Siege was always an also-ran. But, to its credit, it's always been the best of the also-rans -- a fully 3D, zero-load-times, epic action-RPG. Dungeon Siege 3 continues that tradition in most respects, but shifts to a much heavier emphasis on story and character development (both in the literary sense and the RPG sense), and to much more complex gameplay mechanics than previous titles had.
And it's not just the gameplay that's been expanded. DS3 is thick on content, with four very well-designed characters, each with his or her own unique play style and niche to fill, as well as their own backstory. Like most action-RPGs, the meat of the gameplay is in the combat: you run from place to place, picking up quests and bashing the crap out of various kinds of baddies. To its credit, DS3 tries hard to explain what's going on around you at any given time, which is no small task since it has a very large variety of powers, items, monsters, status effects, and quests. all of which are thrown at you pell-mell.

Part of the confusion here is that the gameplay is quite complex for an action-RPG, with each character having one defensive and two offensive combat stances to use at any given time, along with special moves tied to the stance they're in, and further super moves tied to those special moves. The system is really cool on paper, with each stance, in theory, being good for dealing with single powerful threats, or multiple small ones, and the special abilities all upgradable along one of two diverging tracks (usually damage-over-time versus instant damage, or offense versus defense). The problem is that all the statistics and specials are too much to keep track of when dozens of enemy automata are trying to cave your head in. Nine times out of ten I would go into a fight reminding myself to switch to this stance if X happened, and use that ability if Y happened, and sure enough, 9 times out of 10, I'd end up just mashing the attack button.
The same was true of my buddy, who played local co-op with me for some time, and he raised another salient point: it's annoying that you can't use one stance's special attacks when in another stance, without going through the stance switching rigmarole. It's limiting and counterproductive in a fight, when you don't want to be thinking about stances, and when it's hard to tell what stance you're in anyway due to the game's crowded screens. It's also annoying that, on the PC version especially, there's no way to remap your keys. If you don't want to use the number keys for your special abilities, too bad for you. This really sucks for those of us who have sweet gaming keyboards (yes, I am that guy), or just those of us who may use a different set of keystrokes for comfort.