Dark Alliance: My first impressions

I just downloaded the Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance game to my Xbox a couple days after its release. Regular readers of Seeking Positivity in the Galaxy will know that I am a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan, but I am light on being skilled in today's video games.  Nevertheless, because of my excitement for Dungeons and Dragons adventures, here are my first impressions of the game.  

First, I am super excited about the options of characters available to play.  They are the characters made famous by R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt Do'Urden adventures, so of course, we are able to play Drizzt with his loyal, magical companion Guenhwyvar, Wulfgar, Cattie-Brie, and King Bruenor Battlehammer.  You know that I had to play Bruenor.  Where is Regis you might ask?  I suspect he will show up somewhere as an NPC, but that is just a hunch.  He is too important to just be left out. 

The game begins at Kelvin's Cairn in a safe spot where there is a merchant, a world map where you can designate locations to travel, a chest to collect treasure gathered in battle, and a teleportation platform that takes you to the locations designated on the map.  The game leaves you to figure out the mechanics of how to equip items, sell and purchase items, collect from the chest, choose locations on the map, but trying things, reading the screen, and pushing random buttons seem to achieve the basic functions of the game.  At least I was able to quickly find a battle tutorial on the map and give that a try.  

In the battle tutorial, the basic attacks are pretty easy to master.  The tutorial, however, gets a little crazy after that.  As the information of what different attacks do and how to do them pop up in a text box in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, you are still in active combat.  In the battle tutorial, you fight two goblins at a time and while they amusingly taunt you with threats and bottom slapping while asking if you like the scenery, you have to read the directions and, for someone like me who apparently cannot tell the left side of the controller from the right, figure out the button combinations and dodge the attacks all at once.  I am sure this is not a problem for this generation's videogamers, but for this guy, it wasn't impossible, but it took all the time I set aside to play to complete the tutorial and feel comfortable that I knew all the available combat maneuvers for Bruenor.  There are about 12 maneuvers.   

With all that, Dark Alliance is a fun combat-oriented game.  I have no doubt that there will be a story to follow, it is Dungeons and Dragons after all.  I look forward to actually entering combat in the story and seeing if I can apply the tutorial lessons with some of the really cool special attacks, or if I will just resort to the basic maneuvers of the game.  I recommend this to anyone who enjoys a fantasy combat game but especially recommend to anyone who has enjoyed the R.A. Salvatore books because we get to do some really cool combat with these loved characters.  I will give more impressions as I dive deeper into the game.  

For the D&D players out there, this game will be perfect for those game sessions that get canceled at the last minute and you need to blow off some D&D steam.  Log in, choose Bruenor and swing that axe at some pesky goblins.