Why we are delaying our Dark Alliance review

I spent a good chunk of the past weekend playing Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance on PlayStation 5. I played about half of the game as dark elf Drizzt Do'urden, and then started over again and played through the game almost to the end with archer Catti-brie. I played solo for the most part, but my son did drop in for several missions, playing as the barbarian Wulfgar. I've played many of the game's missions three to four times. 

So right now, I've got the scoop on the pre-release version of Dark Alliance, and as it stands, the scoop isn't so great. Dark Alliance - while still fun because Dungeons & Dragons always is - has quite a few problems on the technical side of the equation. I'm playing Dark Alliance on PS5, and the multiplayer servers were only turned on a few days ago, partway into the pre-release review period. So things are fairly new, but it must be noted that server performance is extremely rough. While playing with just two players, my son and I experienced a lot of jittery combat, with both of us dropping frames and teleporting across the battlefield in a herky-jerky manner that almost made us lose track of where we were. There's no telling what will happen when you add two more warriors to the mix.

Of course, those server problems will likely be settled with time and patches. Far more concerning is the enemy UI. Enemies are dumber than a sack of rocks that's been sent to the back of the classroom. You can absolutely cheese the game during just about every battle, particularly when playing with Catti-brie, due to her ranged abilities

There is an invisible line that characters cross, which will activate enemies and make them "notice" you. They start moving forward to attack you. Take a step backwards across that line, and they instantly turn around and go back to their starting positions, as though you weren't just pumping them full of arrows. The real issue, though, lies in the fact that Catti-brie can attack enemies from behind that line. That means that you can stand there and clear an entire room of enemies, and they don't react until they are in the midst of their death animations.

I found myself running into rooms to draw the dudes close to me, then stepping back across the safety line and blasting them. And I'm not talking chip damage here - I have tooled my Cati-brie to maximize her crits, so I can do some pretty serious damage from afar. Her fully charged arrow attacks have a knock-back effect too, so you can walk right up to the bigger, slower guys and get higher damage without every worrying about them attacking back. I took down entire end-level bosses on the mid-tier difficulty by just standing there and blasting them with arrows until they fell over dead. It ain't great, folks.

There are a bevy of other problems. Hit detection is so poor that most of Cati-brie's special moves don't land at all. When the animation clearly shows the arrows hitting the target, hits fail to register damage about 90% of the time - more often than could be explained by critical fails on dice roles. And level design specifically creates situations where the player can retreat to higher ground, and just rain down hell on the dummies standing below. 

But - and this is a huge but - I've yet to play Dark Alliance the way it is intended to be played. I haven't had the opportunity to swing into battle with a full party of adventurers, which can change up the dynamic completely. There is also the matter of day-one patches, which could alter the experience of playing Dark Alliance considerably. 

So I've decided to wait and review Dark Alliance after it has been out in the wild for a few days. I want to drop into groups of new players with my baller high-level Catti-brie and superhero around for a while. I want to test the server performance after the game is being pounded on by the masses. And most importantly, I want to run a few missions on the higher difficulties, which have been impossible to run solo.

I've actually enjoyed much of Dark Alliance, despite its un-ignorable pre-release flaws. I want to be as fair as possible to the game, so I am waiting to review it in its intended release state. And that means giving the team working on Dark Alliance the opportunity to release any pending code that might improve the gameplay. But at this point, I would warn prospective players to approach Dark Alliance with care - this might not be the D&D adventure you are looking for.

The following video shows me running through a mid-level mission with Catti-Brie. I was somewhat overpowered for the difficultly level I chose, but you can see the enemies not responding when I kill them. You can also see a few instances where the game allows me to kill entire rooms from above, and about a million times that my special moves don't connect with enemies. Unfortunately, my audio crapped out, so you have to make do without my witty banter.