Developer: Snowblind studios

Ever heard of a PC game from Blizzard called Diablo? It’s a hack and slash RPG for the PC way back in the mid 90’s. Played with an isometric, top down view, the player guides the characters through a series of randomly generated dungeons, slaughtering everything in their way, and strategically running from enemies they couldn’t. It was a highly successful game, spawning many imitators, and here’s one for the Game Cube console: Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance.

Nobody likes the Dwarf. Starting out I picked the archer, while my girlfriend picked the elven sorceress, the only lady of the trio. The other character was a dwarf, no one wants to play as the dwarf. So our first task was to cleanout some tavern owner’s rat cellar. Unlike Blizzard’s classic, the dungeons were not randomly generated, and the characters and the environment were all made up of 3D rendered polygons. Even the NPC’s (non-player characters) had considerable detail. Nevertheless, just like Diablo, the objective of the game was to kill everything in sight, build up your levels, and then kill some more. So, we went down the cellar, and killed some rodents. Of course, the mama rat got upset about it, us murdering all of her children and all, so she decided to chew us up, full of holes, like cheese. After our horrifying death, we loaded up the game again to get some mama rat retribution.

Inspired by the Devil. The game plays exactly like Diablo, but with two players. So you run around and kill things. Sometimes you need to pull a lever, or pick up a key to open a door, to get inside a room full of more monsters to dismember. Despite the repetitive nature of the game play, it never got boring. Probably because there’s always some ridiculously powerful monster in the next room ready to drain our life away. The entire game consisted of exploration, murder, and moments of sheer panic.

Choking on the details. There were frame rate hiccups when there were too many monsters on screen, but otherwise, everything looked really good. Your character’s appearance changed with whatever weapons or armor you had equipped. The reflective surfaces on the game’s most powerful armor was particularly impressive. It gave off a clean crisp glossy sheen that wasn’t present in the PS2 version. The PS2 version however, didn’t have any frame rate issues.

Years after it was released, this is still one of the more enjoyable Diablo style dungeon crawlers available. Even better if you could play it with a friend. Developed by the famous Snow blind studios, it should be available in bargain bins everywhere.