Dungeon Siege is one of the fathers of the dungeon crawling genre on the PC. There’s just something addictive about running around smacking everything and trying to find the best loot. Don’t forget about challenging boss fights though for the best loot. Dungeon Siege III continues this tradition with an engaging story, interesting characters, and beautiful graphics. The game, however, falls flat on a few notes.

You get to pick a character amongst four with their own unique background story. I chose the Lescanzi female that uses guns for combat. I got a long-range carbine as well as a pistol and shotgun combo backup for close range. As you run around killing enemies you can use a variety of powers that use focus, and you gain this by killing enemies and hitting them. Think of this as mana. Then you have power orbs you can use for special attacks, but these only regenerate when enemies die. These powers vary by character, but they are essential for winning battles. I found combat to be fun and addictive here, but I never really felt I had the upper hand. I ended the game at level 35, did 99% of side quests, and still struggled through some tough fights. I had the best armor and weapons, but always I was struggling. Using my offensive, defensive, and passive powers really helped for healing, staggering enemies, knocking them back, and slowing them down. If you play single player you get a partner (Anjali the fire archon), but there are some problems here.


The game is best played in multiplayer, but the single player AI for your partner is touch and go. When you fall you don’t die until your partner dies, but they can revive you. I had issues where I was in tough fights and she just kept fighting and never came to heal me, then she became overwhelmed and died. This was frustrating because you revert to the last save point, and long boss fights towards the end can make you tear your hair out in frustration. However, the game would be impossible to play without the revive feature so I am grateful for that.


Exploring is very linear with a few branching paths, but at least you won’t get lost thanks to the quest line you can pull up and follow around. Besides, going off the beaten path isn’t worth your time because there’s no “major” loot. Every chest seems to have a few various items and some gold. The armor looks great and shows on your character visually, but most of it was junk. Unless you access a new area the shops will have poor armor, but rarely did I get one that boosted every attribute. Usually, I had to sacrifice attack power for more armor, agility for will, elemental damage for will, and so on. Where is all the good high-level armor at? It doesn’t really exist, and enemies drop armor and weapons that are worse than what is at stores. Dungeon crawlers are all about the awesome loot and Dungeon Siege III is lacking it.

At least the story is interesting with your character trying to recruit legionnaires to stop Jeyne Kessynder’s army. There is dialog choice that affects how the game turns out, and these actually meant something. A choice early on can make a boss fight later easier. My only problem here is that the conversations are dull because you just stare at the characters and usually skip most dialog. The voice acting is good, but that’s no excuse for dull ways of doing dialog. Between each chapter are hand drawn art slides, but they are ugly and I would have liked to see some nice pre-rendered ones.


The graphics are gorgeous with great lighting effects and high-resolution textures. The locations vary immensely and you always look forward to seeing what area you will be in next. The music is great as well with beautiful orchestral scores the following in your footsteps. Dungeon Siege III is worth the bargain bin price these days, and dungeon crawler fans will have a blast here with challenging boss fights, and varied locales to explore. Don’t expect great loot, or even varied enemies because the enemy setup tends to be predictable. Dungeon Siege III is a fun dungeon crawler but could have been better.

Note: The game is compatible with AlienFX for those lucky enough to own an Alienware computer. When your health bar is green all your lights are as well, same when yellow, and then red. This is really neat, but the problem is there is a delay for some reason and it was never patched. Your health will be red, but then your lights are still green. This only happens sometimes, but nonetheless, it is a cool feature.

Yet another underrated Obsidian title.

I have never played a Dungeon Siege title before this with them being a PC franchise previously and me being a console only gamer. In fact, I had never even heard of them until the announcement of a third installment. That being said, I have played games by Obsidian who took up the task of the series in this installment. While by no means perfect their games have on the whole had some great ideas and always been fun which is exactly what I got with Dungeon Siege III.

The land of Ehb has seen great changes since the previous games (apparently). Thirty years ago the 10th Legion allegedly plotted to kill the king going against their oath. A young and charismatic woman named Jane Kassynder rallied the church and the people against them slaughtering the 10th legion and tearing down their chapter houses. Fast forward several years and the surviving 10th legion members are meeting to reform and rebuild.

You play as one of the surviving decedents of the 10th legion from a choice of four characters. Each character comes from vastly different backgrounds and although the story and plot never changes certain encounters with characters and dialogue are different depending on who you choose to play as in relation to their personal history which is a nice minor touch.

Gameplay wise Dungeon Siege 3 is, shockingly enough, essentially a dungeon crawler. Each character has a small but effective ability set to choose from starting off with only one and gaining more of your choice as the character gains experience and levels up. Abilities are separated into two categories, special and defensive. The latter being healing skills and damage or armour buffs while special abilities are all offensive and are completely different depending on the character in a mixture of long range and close range attacks.

The skill sets are excellent and provide a nice range for each character leaving them all fairly balanced except for perhaps Lucas who seems to have limited range abilities that also seem weaker then the others though his melee attacks are fairly strong. To counter the small ability set each character at level up also gets to choose in which direction an ability takes such as more damage or greater area of effect with two choices for each skill. There are also passive proficiencies to choose from that may increase healing effect, chance to get a critical hit among others allowing for each character to be grown how you see fit. It's not overly complicated but allows a decent amount of flexibility so works very well.

In between dungeons and sometimes in the middle of them there are plenty of side quests to partake in from various characters. These are sometimes just fetch quests or give you a specific enemy to kill but are never enough to get repetitive but give just enough to keep things interesting off the main story. These side quests often result in decent loot, experience and the occasional extra boss to boot.

The multiplayer is where things crumble a little though after having played the game several times and a fair bit of co-op I can see why it was done the way it was. The problem with playing co-op is that unless you are hosting you get nothing for playing, no equipment, loot, experience, nothing, you are simply playing as one of the hosts characters. All level up choices and equipment you equip to the character you play as stay with them for the host and for whoever may play as them next in their game, if you don't host, you don't gain anything. On the other side of things it means every game is balanced, you can't level up loads in a co-op game then use that character in your own single player campaign nor can a level 30 character jump into a hosts game who is only level 1, it makes sense though some form of reward for playing co-op would have been nice to at least give the feeling of progress.

The co-op itself is pretty fun though with up to four players (one for each character) available at any time and is especially fun on harder difficulty levels where players have to really work together to overcome enemies, especially certain boss fights. My favorite part of the co-op though strangely is the dialogue. During conversations options come up in how to replay and each player can choose what they think should be said though the host has the final say. It in no way impacts the game itself but is a nice way of getting everyone involved in conversations I have never seen before.

The presentation in Dungeon Siege 3 is excellent with some great spell effects, excellent voice acting giving believability to each character and a decent amount of detail in the world. Obsidian had a bit of a reputation for having fairly glitchy games as they use other peoples game engines but DS3 was created using their own engine Onyx which was created from the ground up not only for RPG's but also to stop any technical issues appearing and in the time it took me to platinum I can say with great confidence it worked.

The main story only lasts for about 20 hours give or take which is pretty short for an RPG but with multiple characters, co-op fun and quite a few trophies that rely on four player team work if you are a hunter of them gives Dungeon Siege 3 a good amount of value.

All in all Dungeon Siege 3 is a great game, the characters and history are great, the ability sets work well, it looks nice and the co-op though unrewarding is still a blast to play. I highly recommend giving this game a chance to any fantasy loving RPG enthusiast.

+ Small but great ability set.
+ Co-op dialogue is excellent.
+ Excellent characters and story.
+ Decent visuals and voice acting.

- Fun but unrewarding co-op play.
- Main story is a little short.