Here at IncGamers, we are catching up with some slightly older games as we make way for the onslaught of new game releases that are heading our way. We just finished playing Atari’s turn-based PSP game, Dungeon & Dragons Tactics and here is our verdict on how well this D&D game plays on the PSP.

As most fans of the genre know, Dungeons & Dragons is an extremely deep fantasy world and the PSP game does a commendable job of capturing the detail that’s associated with it. The game’s strength lies in the variety of characters that you can choose from when creating your party and the ease of dropping them into your adventure. It’s simple to get a nice balance of warriors, tanks, sorcerers and archers, which is the type of lineup you’ll need when going into some fairly tough turn-based battles. There is some built-in latitude if things don’t work out for your cast of characters since you can rest members of your party as long as take them out of harm’s way. It doesn’t completely exonerate you from being strategic with your character choices since “weak sisters” will die quickly and no amount of rest will revive a dead party member. On the other hand, you can always grab a new character between levels in the game (at a zero experience level) so every decision you make results in certain tradeoffs in how you manage your party members. The downside to managing a system of deep characters is the high level of detail tends to overburden the interface that’s used for the characters, which I will get into later.

While I’m on the subject of downers, the gameplay does have some quirks that need to be mentioned. The turn-based system is handled fairly well but it is not without its faults. The gameplay combines a free-roaming structure that you would see in a real-time RPG but all of the actions are turn-based including the movement of the characters. This makes it a true turn-based game in every sense of the term but it also has the adverse effect of slowing down the overall pace considerably. The chess mode for accelerating the movement of your characters helps a bit but not enough to alleviate the monotony of just getting around the levels. A better design decision would have been to go with free-roaming until your party gets within a certain distance of an enemy. If not this, how about the ability to move all of your characters as one group since having to move each individual character separately produces a fair amount of dead time in the game.

In addition to the single-player, there are a wide variety of multiplayer modes that can be played with three other players via ad-hoc (local) mode. The core game types are Co-op Dungeon Bash and Player vs. Player Deathmatch. If you and your buddies are hardcore turned-based gamers, the multiplayer component might be a reason enough to go with D&D Tactics.

The graphics won’t bowl you over but they are good enough to capture the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons. You’ll be playing most of the game in the zoomed-in mode so you’ll notice the enemies don’t look all that great but your party members are fairly well-detailed. The environments are acceptable even if they are a bit barren. On the downside, the blue turn-based grid doesn’t help matters in the graphics department. I understand the need to make it easy to identify where you can move your characters but I think a simple colored outline for the squares would have been just as easy to see and would have surely looked a hell of a lot better. The blue movement squares just give the game a low-budget look. The visual are also lacking on the action front by not showing the characters react to attacks. You’ll see the end result such as the loss of the hit points or when the character actually dies (they slump) but that’s it.

The interface design is also a bit disappointing, specifically the character profile pages and the in-game action menu, which are all text-based. This is a tough one to criticize since the decision to go with a text-based interface allows more screen real estate for the action itself. The downside is the amount of menu scrolling you have to do for executing actions and getting character information. Most RPGs tackle inventory management through an icon-based interface and D&D Tactics would have benefited from such an approach since the current system of scrolling multiple text bars to do anything with your characters becomes rather a rather tedious affair. Mixing text (for battle actions) and visual icons (for inventory management) would have given the game a more intuitive feel as well as a more pleasing look.

The music in the game is excellent as it has a nice Lord of the Rings vibe to it. The sound effects are fine but the grunting (reaction when attacked) should have been re-recorded or edit out. Another problem is the slight delay in the sound of a weapon and the reaction to a given attack. Upon pulling off an attack, you won’t hear the resulting sound such as the clanging of a sword until well after the hit point icon appears over your enemies head. It’s not a huge deal but it’s annoying nonetheless.

Rolling a turn-based Dungeon & Dragon experience into a portable gaming system is not an easy feat and Tactics gives it the old college try. Unfortunately, there are just a few too many snags, specifically the overall pace and interface design that keep it from being a recommendation for you PSP. D&D fans that crave the character depth and can tolerate the pace and lacking interface design might be satisfied with it but less patient gamers will find the experience to be rather tiresome.

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