This TB-RPG will certainly stay at the top of defining "must haves" for the PSP. Some gripes, but it's still w
D&D Tactics has really put forward the idea "Big boys want to play too." In that alone, this game has earned a lot of respect, challenging the idea that portable gaming is only the domain of Pokemon and childish artwork.
Getting into the game technically, D&D Tactics will not be for the impatient. In some ways, that plays into what I've already noted in who the game focuses on. Many younger gamers who want to see results and glitter right away might be turned off of D&D Tactics.
Starting out, my characters were highly ineffective and even at level 4, my ranged units miss a lot, my bard and druid are useless in melee and their spell selections leave a lot to be desired. That being said, you can start to see the tiered nature of the feats, skills, abilities start to play out by level 4. The options widen as time goes on.
What helped things along was the gameplay. The action of every scenario really keeps you playing until the end. The story is enough to keep you interested and again, the game isn't horrible if you are willing to admit that mainstream appeal damages the potential for good games like this.
The first complaint I have is that the graphics are a little sluggish. You can see they tried to motion blur things a little to get away with what are ultimately low frame rates. If you turn off the panel that shows you turn order, you can get a bit of a refund on screen sapce and FPS.
My second complaint would be the menus. D&D tactics makes very inefficient use of the high resolution display of the PSP. There is a lot of large font text, but not enough visual abstraction to supplement that. There's no paper doll to show you what is where, just stacks upon stacks of text as if it had been written down on a character sheet. In my opinion, this was lazy on their part and even though they present all the information, it could have been much better.
Third, there are bugs in the menus! If you navigate in just a certain special way, you can accidentally offset the highlighted item (usually in skills/feats selections) by one. This has the effect of changing what you select based on what's highlighted, and also the description text. This is easily mitigated by navigating one screen back and restarting, but tedious none the less.
Fourth, the character animations and effects haven't impressed me much. Thankfully I still enjoy things outside of that and I know there's still more to be delivered. But to be honest, my party members are way too happy when they pick up some arrows. The animation wastes time given the slow FPS and the long flailing arm movements. To be honest, I really don't care. It's about as cheesy as if they did some air guitar every time they opened a chest.
The most important and fifth biggest complaint I have is that the multiplayer is only adhoc. Which to me just shows that they were lazy and didn't want to give the game all the features it needed. There are many elements of MMO turn based RPGs can access if the developers would just do it already.
Some additional improvements to consider for the future: Custom maps, DM mode, more use of the unique and telltale Sony Memory Stick. Anything from downloadable content, to generating content from your PC. Many of these suggestions I've made in the past, and I still think are worth considering.
There is room for a better packed sequel, and I hope that Atari will deliver in the future. There's just so much more you can do with this... But the game makes for an excellent introduction and does deliver.