D&D Heroes is a cheap imitation of the stellar Dark Alliances games.
Dungeons and Dragons Heroes follows the story of a band of four adventurers. In the past they stopped an evil archmage from destroying the land, in typical fantasy adventure fare, at the cost of their own lives. These heroes were buried honorably and, as is par for the course, soon enough they were mostly forgotten. However, years have passed and a great evil has besieged the land once again and these brave warriors are called back from the dead to fight off this evil. Why they couldn’t get some new adventurers to save the land and they instead need to despoil the peacefully dead, I don’t know, but there you have it. Now you must control one, or all, of these warriors and save the land.
The story for this game is fairly disinteresting and about as run of the mill as it gets. To save the world you must gather up a number of different elemental items and this entails traveling to these varied worlds and fighting through a number of bosses. To anyone who reads fantasy novels or has played any of the earlier Final Fantasy games, this will all feel terribly familiar and done. Even the twists in the story feel kind of unexpected and very uninteresting.
Sadly, even the gameplay in this game feels kind of sub-par. In these action adventure games, one of the greatest things is character customization. Making your character feel like he is yours. But you don’t get that in this game beyond naming your character. You have a pregenerated identity and you cannot change any aspect of your appearance. The only real control you have over this aspect of your character is in selecting his skills and ability score increases to be had as he levels up.
However none of these abilities or their upgrades feel particularly awe inspiring. You have your run of the mill abilities, such as things to let your less martially inclined characters use the better weapons and armor or to make your warriors better with particular weapons, like axes, swords and polearms. Then come the class specific spell-like abilities. To any who play D&D 3rd edition many of these abilities will feel familiar. Many of the mage and cleric spells are familiar from the pen-and-paper game however they are far less useful. All of these abilities are kind of generic and I honestly found the large majority of them more useful for novelty or in very particular situations. Overall, I wasn’t really all too interested in using them and settled more for hacking enemies to death. This was really disappointing.
There is a huge plethora of weapons and armor to equip your character with, as well as rings, amulets and other accessory magic items. There are also plenty of one use magic items that allow you to do a variety of effects to the enemies. But much like the abilities in this game, they really do feel useless except when you are trying to conserve your mana. This is doubly true in multiplayer where you have other characters to back you up.
The graphics for this game are pretty much what you would expect from this genre. They’re nothing all that impressive except for some of the larger monsters and bosses. They are pretty cool to look at but all of the backgrounds are incredibly flat feeling. They don’t really look all that impressive and they are very boring to look at for the long periods of time you will be staring at them. Abilities aren’t really all that interesting either, except for a few of the more explosive mage spells. But even they are fairly bland to be watching.
The audio is fairly bland here too, especially the lame voice acting. I actually found myself laughing several times at the really cheesy voice acting that I was subjected to. The only really cool sound effects are the ones that accompany some of the abilities when they are used. Otherwise, the length and breadth of this games audio I could have done without. I simply turned on the CD player and tuned it out.
Now I will admit that a good portion of my serious dislike for this game is a matter of taste. There will be some who will like the abilities and get a kick out of using them and picking their favorites. I didn’t like them but some others will. If you do, then consider this game rated a 7 at least. But I honestly didn’t like anything this game had to offer and I would have gladly passed on it. But as it stands, I don’t exactly regret buying this game but I honestly wish this game had been a bit more polished before being released. The audio and graphics could have been a bit more interesting.
Pros: Four interesting characters to use, a variety of abilities and spells to take and an interesting story.
Cons: The enemies feel pretty non-stop in some areas, spells feel kind of useless sometimes and the camera is pretty horrendous in multi-player modes.
Score: 6
Recommendation: I suggest you pass on this game as it does too much wrong even if it does some things right.