Dungeon Siege III has plenty of secrets, some of which haven’t been discovered and listed. Whether it’s a secret treasure room, a cool new weapon, or a new character ability, there are plenty of options for gamers to get their fill of the dungeon crawling style of Dungeon Siege III.

Check your surroundings at all times, there may be secrets hidden in the walls. Either by touch or by destruction, there are certain rooms that can be found throughout the game that are not visible on the map. Some rooms will require in-game tasks that are naturally found in the environment to access as well.

TIP: Inside Gunderic Manor in an office, there is a hidden treasure room. The same can be said for the Gunderic Mausoleum, in which there is a bricked up archway in the first room you enter after the first causeway opens. That doorway can be destroyed to access that secret room.

Train and save money for long enough and something odd will become apparent to you. When visiting the shops the first time after a level up, better weapons will be available that are expensive but worth buying if the money is available. If you leave that town with that shop, those special items are replaced by more generic attribute items.

TIP:  Saving money will be a problem in a game that always has a new item to buy at every turn. Save up enough though, and just after leveling up reveals exciting and often very advantageous weapons and armor purchases.

Using the defensive blocking ability all the time might seem like the way to go when you’re swarmed by enemies, but there are moments when you can get flanked and then flayed alive. Don’t just stand there and get attacked hoping that you won’t get hit. More often than not, you will.

TIP:  Blocking should be carefully learned and then implemented into combinations because both Reinhart and Anjali have the limited ability to phase out of existence and appear in the desired direction. This will seem much flashier in comparison to Katarina and Lucas, who just roll like normal.

Learning the area affect spells of each character can be a great addition to your set of combo’s. Each ability can stack one on top of the other especially during a fight with many swarming opponents.

TIP: Chaining together a combo of a summoned creature, plus a distance attack and then a melee attack as well as an area affect spell one right after is a terrific combination to keep you alive. Just be aware of the health meter.

Upgrading your characters’ proficiencies and talents can easily lead to mistakes. In each of the proficiencies there are two separate sections to upgrade within that ability so you must choose one or the other since you won’t be able to choose both.

TIP: Be very selective and tactical in your approach to selecting proficiencies, you’ll only get a chance to upgrade one aspect of the two in the proficiency bar. Choose Proficiencies that allow for health to return when characters are attacked. Also, Reinhart’s Lightning Strike and Katarina’s rifle can be upgraded for a higher chance to ricochet off the first target and hit a second target. This saves focus points that you can use for the next unlucky target.

Katarina might seem weak at first but her dual wielding guns are a huge boon if you take the time to train and upgrade her weapons. Third person shooting fans looking for a fun time will enjoy this little slice of heaven stuck inside an action RPG. For even more Tomb Raider-type fun, play as Katarina and dual wield your pistol and shotgun. Just make sure you don’t get overwhelmed by an entire horde of enemies. Her armor won’t hold up.

TIP: Ever seen the movie Equilibrium with Christian Bale? Did you love the concept of a ‘Gun Kata’ or martial arts shooting form? Then don’t ignore Katarina’s power sphere abilities when she uses her shotgun and pistol. She’ll dual wield like out of a movie, arms spread, shooting 360 degrees to eliminate her foes.

Additionally, RPG fans who are interested in item collection and intense training sessions will realize that when you save, your health returns to 100%. This doesn’t work for focus points, but hit points do fill up again. When going to the save points, it’s not entirely necessary, though always suggested to save just as a precaution.

The action aspect of this Role-Playing Game means that you won’t be able to set your characters with a certain auto-set of attacks and healing that you would normally be able to do such as in the Final Fantasy series. Here you’ll have to be alive and paying attention rather than zoning out with a slightly glazed look on your face.

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Training is an inherent part of Dungeon Siege III, like many role-playing games. As you journey across Ehb there will be forests that reveal a host of monsters that yield experience points as you search for treasure and weapons. It will give you a good sense of the character’s abilities as well as their shortcomings.

Traditionally, as with most RPG’s, these shortcomings make the characters well balanced across the board but in a few instances, a Dungeon Siege III character can become awkward to use in combat.

Make no mistake, this is not at all like Assassin’s Creed where the character is immediately remarkable after 30 minutes of play through. Training is a requirement and will only serve to enhance character appeal. Time spent training early on can yield very nice abilities to play with, depending on character choice and playing style.

Unfortunately, for sheer excitement during combat, the female characters seem to have gotten more of the fun abilities while the men are left to languish with somewhat generic physical combat maneuvers. In a game where training is not only suggested but required, exciting combat is a huge plus for gamers. The built in weaknesses of each of the four heroes succeeds in making the player choose the one closest to their playing style.

Your long range shooter won’t have much armor initially, while your swordsman won’t have any distance attacks at all. Several of the power sphere attacks are just bigger versions of the characters’ standard magic or physical attack. The power sphere meter fills as you attack and another new sphere appears every few level ups. These special attacks might have greater range and damage but the visual affects aren’t always going to wow you at every moment.

There are a few, however, that players will never get tired of using because of sheer cool factor. This isn’t a bad thing since a screen can get bombarded with multiple onscreen spells triggering at once, but does reduce some of the variety in an already exceptionally focused game.

Katarina, the Ranged Shooter of Dungeon Siege III, is the illegitimate daughter of the former Grand Master of the Legion. As a Lescanzi witch, she’ll have a greater degree of magic power later in the game and her initial benefits will be long and short range combat. She will have the power of a long range rifle, but this requires some strategic thinking since the rifle doesn’t work as well as it could up close, so upgrading your pistol and shotgun is suggested.

Charging straight into the fray will only result in a quick death when you get overwhelmed. Unlike his half sister Katarina, Lucas Montbarron can survive using only his two-handed greatsword. In the truest sense of the word, Lucas is a classic swordsman through and through. He’ll have a set of rush attacks as well as some minor degree of magical power. Much of the time, your sword and shield combination won’t do you much good at all, especially when fighting against large groups.

Trade defense for offense and stick to the larger two handed sword. His weapon can still be used as a shield but his major weakness is that he has no ranged attacks at all. This makes certain aspects of the game, such as boss combat, somewhat more difficult. Reinhart Manx is a descendant of a Grand Mage Manx, who is both a Mage and scholar.

He will easily be the strongest characters available early on in the game. This is fine, except that when using his magic attacks, there’s a huge empty buffer zone between the player and the magic attack. Distance magic attacks will cover one area, and then once enemies get close, switching to melee attacks to hold back the enemy hordes.

It’s an annoyance to switch in between the two modes in an otherwise strong character. His melee attacks are strong as well, but not very exciting to watch. Anjali, easily the most fun and versatile character in the entire game, is a joy to play. Not of this earth in the traditional sense, she is an Archon that has a floating fire elemental form that’s both gorgeous and deadly. Her ability to throw fireballs at a distance is only matched by her ability to burn the enemies that surround her while she attacks.

In human form, she wields a fire element spear that is lethal at close range. You’ll probably stick to the fire elemental form for the most part, but the human form has its own appeal from many angles. Something that is nice about the game is that you’ll have multiple save slots. When you want to save, find a save point and do so; there are plenty in the game. This makes playing through the game as all four characters much easier versus having one save slot only, losing all your past saves every time you want to start a new character.

Many of the boss monsters in the game will chase you and, at least early in the game, there will be a set of trees or a formation of rocks that stops the monsters from chewing you up. Running around in a circle might not be the most fun strategy, but it’s often the most useful. Stopping to turn around and attack can then be thrown into the mix, and there are certain creatures you’ll be able to catch up to by running up behind them and attacking.

When facing boss creatures, having a companion with you will make your life much easier. Hopefully, you’ll spend some time upgrading the companion character so that they can help you when you’re stuck. At the very least, the companion character can help revive you, assuming that they don’t die right after you!

Gaining influence with your companion character will yield small attribute bonuses to your primary character, though they aren’t as noticeable at first. Each companion character will offer a bonus boost that varies by companion character but is generally a +5 bonus in those areas.

With many players getting Anjali as a companion character, it is likely that a +5 attack bonus is in the works for a lot of players. This is a nice extra thrown in for those players who do take the time to painstakingly answer the conversation questions correctly. It will not however, replace training and weapons attributes as a valuable source of raising the level of the primary character.

The heroes of Dungeon Siege as a whole, seem to be balanced in their abilities with one or two minor exceptions. The characters are different enough for multiple playing styles, but the voice acting and script leave much to be desired. The characters and the action aspect of this role-playing game make for a more active, if slightly repetitive playing style.

Multiple button presses allow for players to chain together a dizzying mix of physical and magical attacks that can light up the entire screen with multiple colors all at once. To learn the true nuances of the game see part 3 for our review of Dungeon Siege III Tips and Tricks. Exceptionally focused, a tad restrained and slightly bland with voice acting, Dungeon Siege III has the potential to be many hours of fun if gamers will stick to this series.

Players looking for a decently plotted, training oriented item collecting action RPG need look no further. Despite boring item titles, odd character design and lack of several visual necessities, Dungeon Siege III plays well enough with most characters and is traditional enough of a sample as an RPG before gamers transition to the full scale entree course of larger more modern scale RPG’s.

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The world of Dungeon Siege III revolves around the shadows of the former 10th Legion. Broken and hunted down, the last surviving members of a once great order have been in hiding ever since their destruction.

Renewed hope follows in the wake of four extraordinary individuals that journey across Ehb, a world filled with great magic and even greater evil by the name of Jeyne Kassynder. It becomes the players job to unite the characters as well as restore faith in the legion from its former corrupt image in a quest for vengeance and redemption.

For the first time on console systems, the Dungeon Siege series has remained largely a PC-only game up until the third and newest sequel. The exception is a PSP continuation of Dungeon Siege II called Dungeon Siege II: Throne of Agony. Another notable difference is that this time, Gas Powered Games, the developer for the first two games as well as their expansions, isn’t present at all.

Instead Obsidian, developer of games such as Neverwinter Nights 2, Alpha Protocol and Fall Out: New Vegas has arrived to take up the mantle of the Dungeon Siege epic.

The original rise and fall of the 10th legion is a sad and ironic story to behold. The 10th Legion was originally created to combat the corruption of the 3rd Legion which had grown arrogant and jealous. The 10th Legion was comprised of four character classes; the mage, the swordsman, the archer and the artillery engineer.

The fall of the 10th Legion is therefore ironic and sad because it is this very same reason given to the people of Ehb that supported the destruction of the 10th Legion by Jane Kassynder preceding the third game. In Dungeon Siege III the role of the archer has changed weapons to a long range rifle and the engineer is gone, replaced by the storyline driven archon, a fire elemental.

In Dungeon Siege III, the still image narrative style of the cut scenes will definitely appeal to comic book fans, but otherwise the storyline is done with mostly conversational video footage. Developer Obsidian chose to have only the other character visible while talking to the lead character. This narrative and conversation style may not be for everyone and leaves transitions between combat somewhat repetitive.

The standard convention of PC games (and dungeon crawlers especially) is the ability to point and click on an enemy or on an item. That’s what you might expect, except that’s not true at all. The way the game is laid out, it is readily apparent that it was meant for console gamers first and PC gamers second.

Thankfully, gamers will be able to quickly switch between two attack stances and one defensive stance with the press of one button, but this can still be a hassle for some gamers. Obsidian appears to be trying to corner the market on dungeon crawling console games, with varying success.

The menu system design are all indicative of console gaming set ups as well. Want to go between your quests and your abilities? You’ll have to back out to the main menu for that, there’s no giant toolbar at the bottom of your screen to select things. Similarly, the menu system doesn’t make good use of space, since there is a lot of blank space right underneath the weapons attributes section.

A description or character image would have been nice. The names for items don’t exactly stretch the imagination either but do a good job of describing the item and its attributes.

For attack and defense, you’ll have to have your character basically face-to-face to do sixty percent of your attacks. One of the key requirements in this game is mastering weapons and magic that can cause damage to multiple enemies. If you don’t, you’ll be left angry and frustrated. Manage the multi-enemy attacks and you’ll be rewarded with rare items and some cool weapons for combat.

Using Focus Points are all about the timing. Attacks will raise Focus Points which will be very handy for magic spells and other special abilities, such as healing. The Focus meter rises easily and often, making the addition of special spells a very welcome feature. Time things well and you’ll be able to unleash a hail of bullets or a man-slaying sword charge.

Time its usage badly and you’ll be left without any focus points at all and a huge number of enemies to fight off without magic for a few seconds. In using Focus Points, a second is the difference between life and death.

The camera can be restrictive since you’ll be able to see somewhat into the distance, but unlike most games, you won’t be able to focus too far in front of the camera. You have two zoom modes and 360 degree turning to look around, but it’s all from high angles, which may bother some gamers who look into the distance to see oncoming enemies.

A noticeable lag was evident when passing near certain areas, most likely to get back into a town. More than likely, this is because the items in the weapons store will change frequently. There are two or three separate sets of gear for each character in each store, and they will rotate as you progress through the game or through training sessions.

Three minutes can mean the difference between a sword that has a +5 attack and a +10 attack. A positive of the game’s layout is that even though there are multiple choices when picking conversations with Non-Playable Characters or interacting with other lead characters, a short cut still exists. Don’t want to hear the same story all over again because you’ve played through once or twice? Not a problem here because Square-Enix and Obsidian kept replay value in mind when they designed Dungeon Siege III.

However, your standard sword and shield knight is pretty boring but thankfully strong. Besides the somewhat flat dialogue and the monotone voice actors, the supposed son of the former legion leader Lucas isn’t as appealing as he could have been. Luckily he has good core attributes to start with and they only get better as time goes on. However, his special abilities are fairly limited to basic variants of swinging a sword or shield.

Unfortunately it seems that the two female characters in the game have all the good abilities, since they can summon creatures to help them fight. This summoned creatures are essentially a disposable third party member who can easily be re-summoned with enough focus points.

Something good about your shooter, unlike every other legion member, is that while they shoot, the character is designed to also back up at the same time. This is a useful gameplay feature versus being unable to back up and attack at the same time. When playing with the other characters, the ability to back up and attack does not exist, which will be frustrating to some players.

The ability to dodge attacks is something that will need to be learned and learned well. Not every gamer will want to spend half their time dodging enemy attacks, but it seems that this is something of a requirement, given that enemies have their own area affect spells to send back at you. Give the dodge and guard buttons a good workout though, and you’ll find yourself constantly mobile and jumping away from spells or monster attacks.

The feeling through the gameplay is that the game is quite focused. In most cases, this is a good thing because the game knows exactly what its purpose and gameplay style is, but at the same time, there is the inescapable feeling that the player is limited by its narrow scope. This is a game that asks for patience from its fans, as well as a healthy helping of determination and in return gives back a moderately encouraging always mobile gameplay.

The storyline is what draws you in but you’ll keep coming back for the characters, see Part 2 for our review of Dungeon Siege III character profiles and design.

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