Special Preview - Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics (PSP)

So I was thinking the other day, what to do during patch day for DDO? Or what can I do for my D&D fix while riding on a long trip with family? Or what if I only have about 15 minutes and just want a quite battle or two?

Well the answer came to me when I was at GenCon. While lurking around the Atari booth because of my two favorite games, Dungeons & Dragons: Online and Neverwinter Nights 2, came my third favorite game: Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics for the PSP.

I was given a presentation of the game and had a bit of a chance to try it out as well. D&D: Tactics is dungeon crawl game based on the D&D 3.5 ruleset. I say based on but after listening to the presentation the game really sticks to the ruleset including turn-base play. My small party wandered down levels of a dungeon seeking a major evil while running into all sorts of creatures including spiders that through a nasty web on the players and one level I ran into a beholder or two. Now one beholder in any D&D based game is a tough battle, but two beholders really are brutal. But the fun was incredible. The only thing missing was the DM sitting across the table telling me that I was getting my butt kicked.

Taking advantage of the excellent graphics features of the PSP, D&D: Tactics really was looking sharp. I remembered complementing the devs on the looks, and they said yes it is looking really good, but we have few more tweaks to go. I was shocked because I was like "tweaks", it already looks great. Now I can't wait to see what they do to make it look even better. On to the controls of the game. Having the familiar menu driven style of a PS2 game or a Gameboy game, I felt very much at home with the controls. Which was a good thing as I was battling for my life against those death ray zapping beholders.

Even though I was bouncing around the game seeing different areas of looks and monster types, the game has a progressive playing story line and endgame with what sounds to be a great battle. So you might want to hook up with 3 of your friends to take on a co-op battle through the dungeon. Using the connectivity features of the PSP you can easily play a multi-player game.

Now I just need to get a PSP for Christmas so when Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics is released by Atari I will be good to go on those long patch days and when I can't get to my PC to fill my D&D habit.

-Tim "Delmar Wynn" Turner