A nice Dungeon hack that has it's moments - both good and bad.
A friend let me borrow it and I beat it in about two weeks. The extended time frame was only because of my limited play time and because of the fact at one point, I did get seriously disgusted with it for a day or two. Because of this, I'm not recommending someone go out and pay full price for the bloody thing, but if you have a friend you can trade with, get on the cheap, or a place where you can find it used, then definitely add it to your collection.
The overall story is interesting but extremely under-developed. As a published author, I really enjoy games that are story-driven. In a good book, characters have a story arc in which they learn and grow. In a good game, the idea is the same and you actually take part of the growth by improving the character's skills. But in a really good game, the story line reflects this growth as well. I didn't see the latter as much in DS2...and the dialogue is lame at times. It's also irritating to have the dialogue start, but half way through a distant enemy sees you and attacks. The dialogue is interrupted as you hack your way through a swarm. By the time it's over, you are so far away from where the dialog triggered, why bother to go back?
When my friend let me borrow it, he told me it was extremely difficult and he couldn't even get through the first level. I managed to get to about level 14 before I ran into to some nasty critters that would kill my toughest warriors in two hits. Multiply that by 10 attacking at the same time and there were points where I wouldn't even get the death scream out of the members, they were dead before they could utter it. That got irritating until I found the patch which seemed to fix the problem.
Other than that - the game was stable on my system. I didn't have any lock-ups or crashes.
The combat got downright overwhelming at times with hordes of bad things swarming in. This resulted in keeping one hand on the mouse, holding down the right mouse button to keep the attacks going, and the left hand on the keyboard pressing hot-keys for healing, manna, the power attacks, and solely watching the health of the party instead of the combat.
I ended up booting my ranger in favor of another fighter. But this didn't help much as the attackers can pretty much pass through the big boys and go straight for your mages. What's the point of having a marching order if the bad guys can literally walk through occupied space? The fighters also prefer to attack from behind, so if you do manage to stop the bad guys in front of you, the fighters will step around, allowing the bad guy to charge the mage while the fighter attacks from behind. This might work if there wasn't swarms because in doing this, your fighter also exposes his back and has to stop to protect it allowing the first bad guy to continue his charge at the mage.
In this game, death and resurrection get irritating too. If your entire party dies in combat, you are resurrected less 25% of your gold at the nearest town - without most of your equipment. You still possess what you had in inventory for the most part (at least the first time you die - if you die again it falls to the ground) but whatever you were wearing is back where you died. So you have to trek all the way back in your skivvies - and the areas you just cleared have regenerated monsters of course - and try to get close enough to your stuff so it automatically comes back to you. This can be practically impossible if you died in a swarm of enemies.
I discovered if I used the teleport spell right before I entered a place that looked pretty bad, it would remain open if I died, allowing me to teleport back to that same spot. At least I could grab my equipment fast without wading through tons of enemies. There is also a storage locker in each town. At first I tried keeping back-up armor and weapons in it. This worked for a time but later in the game, as the party increases in size, this becomes almost impossible to do.
As the game progressed, my storage locker had the sole purpose of holding enchantable items and "reagents". The game like many in the genre has items which can be upgraded with various trinkets to improve them. Unfortunately this system is unwieldy and time consuming. You don't save any money creating stuff, and most of the stuff you loot off of dead enemies is going to be better anyway. Plus you can't break things down - a feature that would have been really cool. Basically, I used my storage locker to hold everything until I collected enough to be worth my while. Then spent quite a bit of time juggling inventory to get all of this crap to the person in town who could enchant the stuff. Then spent more time mixing and matching, adding armor points and resistance percentages, spending a ton of money, only to give up because I couldn't match or improve what I already had on. I managed to create a couple of decent pieces, which were promptly rendered obsolete on the next level.
The last irritation was saving, then quitting the game. If you saved in the middle of the level, even at a town. It would treat you as if you were trying to cheat the resurrection (if you roll back to a saved game, instead of dying, it resets you to several stages back on the previous level so you have to do it all over again). Okay, if the designers want to do this so you can't cheat death fine, but if I'm in the middle of something and have to quit while I'm still alive, I shouldn't have to replay levels...grrrr!
The powers and magic your party members can develop are a lot of fun and are one of the high points of the game. There's nothing quite as satisfying as pulling of a power move in swarms of enemies and watching the hit points drain away. When all is said and done, your party steps out of a giant pile of enemy bodies - I highly recommend the "pick up all" button and sorting the loot later.
Toward the end of the game, it does get a bit repetitious as you are slogging through tough bad guys for a major boss fight. But once you get there, you figure the ultimate boss fight is around the corner - it's not. Hey, I just stomped these "sub-bosses" and now you're throwing grunts at me again? Sheesh! It has a definite feel of the Rodney Dangerfield of RPG - no respect!
Overall though, the game is enjoyable and if you are a fan of the genre it is a good addition to your library. Good luck and have fun!