Mediocrity defined. Servicable yet undeniably sloppy.
Of course, if combat was automated, things go faster right? Baldur's Gate & Icewind Dale proved that, making the game flow relatively smooth. Sadly, that's simply not the case in D&D Tactics.
Everything from combat to movement to party management, are all awkwardly executed, making the game feel as if it was moving at a snail's pace.
Due to the fact that this is supposedly a tactical game, there's a lot of emphasis on grid movement. The problem is, movement tends to be really slow due to the fact that you have to move 6 of your men one by one during both combat and exploration. Of course, combat is quite a given. Moving all of your PCs one by one during exploration though, really slows the game's pacing down. It's simply too tedious to shuffle through your whole party just to move everyone in one direction.
This problem is made more problematic by the fact that the interface is really hard to work with. The camera is strangely, hard to manipulate, leading to situations where one might find himself struggling just to move the cursor to a point in the battlefield. Though the game emphasizes 3D graphics and lighting, the most effective view is a Spartan overhead perspective.
Yeah the 3D graphics and lighting, although a bit impressive, gets in the way of the game, shooting it in the foot. Perhaps its due to the PSP's limitations but it seems that there was simply a lot of wrong choices in game design.
The weight of the PSP's limits is really felt when even the menus seem to react slowly when selected. Without Chess mode turned, on, combat animations are pathetically slow, leading to battles that can last for hours. Combine this with the already mentioned problematic exploration and things really take a turn for the worse. Ironically, Chess mode moves too fast, with the players unable to see the details of what actually happened in combat, resulting in situations where the player will actually only notice that one of their PCs is dead long after he or she has died.
Even managing your characters is a pain. Due to the choices in interface, simply transferring gear from one PC to another is already a lot of trouble. Moreoever, the game isn't very newbie friendly. Although there's some sort of in game dictionary/ruleset, the developer could've at least taken time to create a tutorial of sorts.
More on the PSP's limitations, the game also takes a lot of liberalities with the 3.5 rule sets. Some aren't too bad like metamagic feats don't not affecting spell slots (some of the stronger ones like quicken spell were taken out to balance out the advantage). However, some really hurt, like the fact that multi classing isn't present in the game. Which is quite strange, as early screen shots show multi classed characters, leading one to deduce that the game might have been rushed out. The rushed game theory is further supported by exploitable quests, non-responsive menus (my archer seems to have a hard time equipping arrows), computation problems, stat bonus items having no effect (or at least, not giving all the effects that it should), and the slight possibility of crashes in game, reported in numerous forums, are only some of the other problems that the game faces.
As for the presentation, Greyhawk is boring as it is, but combine this with movies of still pictures with text is just pathetic. I ended up just skipping the plot movies. Speaking of which, some people complain that the text scroll too fast. I myself find that it scrolls too slow during such movies.
The tactical element of the game works alright enough, bringing combat, combat and more combat. Well if you wanted to role play, you really should be playing real D&D anyway. Admittedly though, the game is a bit hard at the start, as the developers weren’t able to do anything about the weak level 1 character syndrome that plagues D&D in general. The game does seem to get easier a bit later in.
With all these problems combined, you get a game that's not too bad but ultimately, feels really unpolished. Even though one isn't familiar with D&D, one can easily figure that the game is ultimately sloppy. Those that ARE familiar with D&D will notice other quirks that will bring their level of enjoyment down, such as the missing cleric domains.
As said, the game is serviceable but considering the possibilities, it could have been so much more. Perhaps if the developers didn’t place too much emphasis on the graphics more resources could have been allocated to flesh the rest of the game out.