Recently, I was offered the opportunity by GPG to participate in a Beta test for Dungeon Siege II. Ecstatic, I grabbed my product key and zoomed over to the FilePlanet site to download a demo of the game I had been waiting over a year for!

Two hours later (yup, two hours with cable internet), I was immersed in the fantastic new world that GPG has created.

Right off the bat, I was thrown into an intro cinematic, which was worlds more impressive than the puny in-game cut scene offered to me in DSI. The cinematic was of excellent quality, and although it wasn't the best I have ever seen, it was very close to it. By watching the cinematic I could already tell that the plot of DSII was going to be very rich and deep. One of the things that disappointed me most in the previous games was the sparse plotlines - something along the lines of "go kill the bad guy". Not so with DSII. There is a rich, detailed plot, which involves several factions, and, from what I can tell, some nice twists, too.

The game starts off in a Dryad jail - you are a former agent of the big bad guy who has come back to help the good guys. The first series of quests has you assaulting Morden (evil people) towers by burning them down.

I won't go into detail with everything I did, but I'll describe the basic systems of the game. Combat is much like it was in DSI. There are four main areas that you can specialize in - Melee, Ranged, Combat Magic, and Nature Magic. Each time you use one of these areas, it will level up and you will become more powerful in that area. If you are using magic, you will be able to use more spells as you level up.

Also continued from DSI is the stats system. There are three main stats: Strength, Intelligence, and Dexterity. Strength improves your hit points and how hard you hit, Intelligence improves your mana, and Dexterity improves your chance to hit and dodge.

New, however, to DSII, is the level up system. In addition to Stats and Combat Type levels, there is also something called a Character Level. The more you fight, the higher your character level gets, much like a traditional RPG. Each time you level up, you obtain a specialty point, which can be put into a combat tree. Each combat tree has many branches, so you can customize your character to a great extent. For example, two melee characters might be completely different, because one specializes in duel wielding and one specializes in protection.

Also new is the Powers system. As a character gains points in the combat tree, he can unlock certain powers by putting points into specific combinations of items on the combat tree. For example, if I put a point in the flame section of my combat magic tree, it will unlock the Flame Nexus power. Powers can be used once, and then must be recharged by killing enemies. I found that I could actually use them quite a bit - often more than once over the course of three or four battles. Powers add a great twist to the game that I have not seen yet in an RPG - incredibly good special abilities that can only be unlocked by committing yourself entirely to one area of expertise.

In the game, you can add multiple members to your party, as well as pack animals and pets. All party members, except pets and pack animals, can level up in whatever area they want to, and specialize in their own combat tree. Pets can be leveled up by feeding them items, making them stronger and bigger. In the preview, I didn't feel that pets were a very viable option as the ones at the beginning weren't great, and they were expensive to feed. However, maybe this will change in the release.

Managing all the members of my party was easier than ever. GPG has put in a nice party control system that lets you make one click and control the whole party. Managing healing spells can be a bit hard sometimes, but other than that it is very simple to control a big group of people.

All in all, combat was great. The game followed a familiar style, but I still didn't feel like I was playing the old DSI game, and I loved it. It is faster paced than DSI, and the change really suits the genre well.

Now I'll move onto graphics, and there's not much to say about them except this: cool. Although not state-of-the-art, the graphics suffice for a 2005 game. Character models and armor models are done very well, but most of the time is spent zoomed out far enough so that you don't really notice them. Spell effects are fantastic, and add some nice immersion to the game. All in all, the graphics are good, but often you are too busy zoomed out or fighting to notice them.

With the preview, I wasn't able to go very far into the game, but from what I saw the plot is going to be good. As I mentioned above, the main character is a prisoner taken hostage by the Dryads who has to redeem himself. However, not much more can be said about the plot, as very little was divulged in the preview.

My verdict for the preview: excellent. Although it did have some bugs (GPG found over 3000 in the beta release), the game seems to be very promising, and I'm sure that the final game will be a smash hit when it is released in August.