Dungeons and Dragons has a long and storied history in the video game world. Not only has it been responsible for a number of games that were ahead of their time, like the original Pools of Radiance series, but they produced some of the greatest PC role-playing games out on the market, the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series. With great success comes great duds however and the D&D brand was no different. With monstrosities like the recent Pool of Radiance game under its belt, it's quite clear that D&D can be a force for good or evil in the video game world. What side does Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics fall on? Well that depends on how forgiving a person you are.

The less said about the bland story that serves as the backdrop to this game, the better. Looking at the graphics that would be considered dated at the release of the PlayStation One and the unwieldy control scheme, its obvious that the lion's share of the work on this game went into making it true to the pen-and-paper D&D games, 3.5 edition. It does this in a remarkable way, taking most of the rules from the game that has made it a hobby and past-time of more than 20 million people. Obviously any video game that attempts to capitalize on the D&D brand has a built in audience to appeal to and, as far as the rules go, this game will likely succeed at that.

When you begin play you will be allowed to make a main hero and five other characters to join him in his travels, or you can simply pick from a batch of pregenerated characters. Making characters is half the fun of this game since there are so many options for you to pick from. All of the standard races are here to be picked from such as the lithe and graceful Elves and the burly Dwarves. In addition all of the basic D&D classes are present, which range from combat oriented Fighters to the holy magic wielding Clerics. However an unexpected bonus comes in the form of two new classes not a part of most D&D games; the Psychic Warrior and Psion. Using their own personal energies to harness psychic powers they act analogous to the Cleric and Wizard classes although the Psychic Warrior is like an odd mesh of Psion, Cleric and Warrior that is a blast to play.

However all is not roses in the garden of D&D: Tactics. Some of the classes seem to have non-functioning skills or are changed from the Dungeons and Dragons rules. Bards don't have the full range of access to their songs like they should which seriously hampers the usefulness of their bard song skill. Psychic Warriors cannot take the Psychic Weapon feat to start the game although they should be able to, likely a coding error. Lastly Wizards, who must prepare their spells in the menu screens before an adventure, are totally inferior to Sorcerers, who can cast spells on the fly, due to the fact that a Wizard cannot learn spells from scrolls in this game, leaving him and the Sorcerer in roughly the same boat. This isn't really enough to damage the game too much but it can give you a bit of a headache when you first turn the game on and figure things out.

Also the rules are not Dungeons and Dragons perfect. When playing D&D as a tabletop game you have books that explain what your stats (such as Strength, Constitution and Charisma) must look like before you can take certain skills, called Feats. These allow you to do things like wield two weapons with more accuracy or to take extra attacks in a battle after killing a foe. However you get no such documentation with this game leaving you to figure out what sort of Feats you can take after making the character, a reversal from the tabletop that could have been fixed with some extra pages to the instruction manual. And before any of you D&D fans pull out your books to try and help with this, do take note that some of the requirements for Feats have changed and others are not in the game at all.