Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance shows off lots of co-op combat
Lots of special abilities and fast-paced combos on display
Upcoming Forgotten Realms romp Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is venuring forth before this month is over with, so developers Tuque Games have been giving a closer look at its combat and characters. A longer combat trailer posted today gives a rather action-packed look at each character's many special abilities and slice-y, dice-y combos. I'm always well up for an action RPG, especially with co-op, which the trailer has plenty of as well.
Tuque Games wheeled out a new combat overview trailer today, which is for some reason narrated by Flight of the Conchords man Jemaine Clement. If you can avoid being distracted by his catching enthusiasm, you can spot a mixture of regular attack chains and bigger skills from each of the four characters. There's some pretty big bow AOE in play, lots of large hammer bashes, and some parrying as well.
Trailers do have a way of distorting what playing actually feels like of course. For a closer look, the developers got together for a livestream last month to show the combat and abilities for each character in a more deep dive format. If you skip to the 23-minute mark here, you can catch them walking through a couple combos, with the gamepad buttons being used shown off on the right side of the screen.
They also get into some additional specifics like the difference between attacks that use up normal stamina, which recovers relatively quickly, and attacks that shorten your stamina meter itself. To restore it, you'll need to either drink stamina potions or pull off some successful parries.
Overall, it looks pretty fast-pased and supportive of the occasional frantic button-mashing. Stringing together impressive combos is always good, but sometimes you get caught light attack spamming in a corner while your pals do the heavy lifting. It seems like an unnamed person might be able to get away with that from time-to-time thanks to all those many different attack chains.
Only question for me is whether I'll have to arm wrestle my co-op mate for playing Catti-brie the archer. He always takes the archer.
Also today, Tuque Games gave a quick look at their post-launch roadmap. They're planning two free DLCs with new levels and difficulty ranks for this summer and autumn. They'll also be launching an expansion "Echoes Of The Blood War" with a new playable character in the autumn. Also also, they've previously announced plans to add split-screen local co-op after launch since folks were quite disappointed to hear it wasn't initially an option.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance launches June 22nd over on Steam. It happens to be one of the top 10 games for June that we're looking forward to.