Now, I have to admit right off the bat I didn’t play much of Dungeon Siege when it first cam out. It never worked on my old PC that was pretty old anyway, and since upgrading I lost interest in hack and slash style games. But people always raved about Dungeon Siege, and I felt out of the loop, as it were. So, luckily for me, and anyone else who missed out on the original, Dungeon Siege: Legends or Aranna comes with the complete version of the first game.

I played through the original for a while, and thought, OK, so this is a traditional dungeon hack. The difference in this to other games was the lush graphics, and the intensity of the action, and the expansive locations, and these are added to by the expansion.

The graphics in this game are really good. The levels are very well designed, with trees that obscure the view, and have different elevations that allow you to have a strategic advantage over the masses of enemies. And there are plenty of enemies to deal with, and I was amazed that the game never seems to load the maps, and can have so many enemies on screen at one time.

The camera allows you to zoom right in, and while a little blocky on my machine (which is getting long in the tooth), the models look well made and quite detailed. They change appropriately when changing armour and weapons and so on. The spell effects, especially the larger area ones, look amazing. The sounds also add a lot to the game, and on occasion I’ve jumped as a monster bursts growling from the ground underneath my party’s feet. The ambient sounds are also great, form the jungle noises of the, err, jungle, to the haunted screams from the deep dungeons.

However, after playing both the original and expansion pack, I noticed that I was hardly playing the game, but rather just sitting there and watching as my men and ladies ran about killing things rather intelligently in the general area of where I clicked my mouse. It kind of felt like I was playing a version of the Sims, but with Swords and magic.

On the one hand this is a good thing, as it means there is no scouring the screen to find members of your team who may have got stuck trying to navigate their way through the maps, only to find them standing still whilst being attacked. But on the other hand, it kind of feels mindless. The story, or lack thereof, also adds to the mindless feel, as you never really become engaged in neither the original story, nor the new one.

While Dungeon Siege: Legends or Aranna is a good expansion pack to the game, it, like the original, doesn’t really add anything to the genre as a whole. It’s a good hack and slash, but there’s been countless of these style of games, right back to Gauntlet. The brief foray into the Multiplayer aspect of the game led me to the same conclusion – it’s good, it looks great and is easy to get into, but and without the fancy graphics and so on, it’s nothing but a clone of so many other games. If you’re after a few hours of mindless fun, then this game is for you, but if you’re after a little more depth, the expansion pack is not where you will find it.