![]() The bosses are many, varied and interesting. There are numerous well-rendered cutscenes throughout the game, many of them serving as a rather unnerving introduction to the boss you're about to fight, and some of the boss battles need a bit of working out before you arrive at a winning strategy. For a single player game the Fighter or Cleric are probably the wisest and certainly easiest choices. The rogue's remit is much weakened by the superabundance of keys for opening chests with, making one of his primary roles more or less redundant. The two non-meleƩ characters (rogue and magic-user) are probably best reserved for the second (or third or fourth) player in multiplayer games, although even these characters can eventually aspire to wear plate armour, something which wouldn't happen in authentic D&D. ![]() ![]() Like the resurrected characters, these weapons are initially weak shades of their former selves and easily outclassed by various weapons that you can find or buy early on in the game - however, there are 'soul shards', some well hidden, scattered throughout the game - the more of these you find, the more powerful your ancestral weapon becomes. Each player carries the mighty weapon he wielded when he originally died. This paves the way for an interesting game item group, the 'Ancestral weapons'. The available characters are limited to a choice from four preset characters - there is a convenient backstory to explain why this is so - basically, the four characters defeated The Obligatory Dark Lord years before but were all killed in the final seconds (The dying moments, you might say) of the battle - but the evil one is back, and so the faithful four have risen to fight him once more. This means that you go around unwittingly attracting items like a magnet, and you often won't realise you've picked up a significant item until you look through your inventory some time later. Unlike the other games (where item collection requires a button press), Heroes makes it a little bit too easy to acquire objects because you pick them up just by walking over them. If everybody just picks up what they can, no single individual will have enough money to buy any of the really powerful items when they are needed. When a very expensive item becomes available in the shops, the banker can buy it and pass it to whichever player needs it. Unfortunately the money picked up by each character is retained by them, not pooled, and can't be passed from character to character like items can, so the best strategy when playing multiplayer is to nominate one player as the 'banker' to collect all money found. Another nice touch is the addition of a 'give' action in the inventory screens so you can pass an item you hold straight to another player. However, the game redeems itself in other ways - I find that the ratio of found treasure to the prices of items in the shops is extremely well balanced, especially on a two player run through. If you have played the other console games mentioned above you will find that the scenery and graphics in Heroes are noticeably less slick or varied, and a bit more monotonous than those in the other games. However, you'll usually play the game with the view zoomed out to its widest extent so you can see incoming attackers while they are still a dozen or so strides away. One nice touch here is that you can zoom the camera quite close in on the characters - when you do, you'll see that the character models are really nicely detailed. On the other hand, if you played and loved Dark Alliance (and perhaps the very similar 'Champions Of Norrath' on the PS2) then Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes is exactly the same kind of action-RPG with the same 3D isometric look-down viewpoint as in the other games. ![]() For the PC RPG fans this game (like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance) will be a bit of a disappointment because it much more closely resembles the PC 'Diablo' games. If you're reading this, the chances are that you have either played the Baldur's Gate (PC) games or 'Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (1 and 2) on the Xbox and you liked them so much that you are trying to find other games which are similar. ![]()
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