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Dungeon Siege is a Role Playing Game - a dungeon crawler in which you command a small force of fighters, rangers, and mages, working together to gather treasure and advance through the world until you arrive at your final destination - the lair of the bad guy. Then, you kill him, and everything is happy again.

The above paragraph is just about all there is for plot in Dungeon Siege. Although the action can be exciting and the graphics are amazing, there isn't much in the story other than "the bad guy is doing bad things". Plot twists? Exciting revelations? Forget it. The story to this game was very badly written. The developers claim that there is exciting lore and a great history of the world hidden throughout the game in the form of books and manuscripts, but that really isn't true. The occasional history book pops up in the game, but they are all extremely boring reads. I would rather be off decapitating monsters than reading an ancient manuscript's feeble attempt to tell me what some guy did thousands of years ago. Maybe that's just me - but for a gamer who wants an exciting and involving plot, this isn't the way to go.

The actual adventuring part is above the level of many other RPGs I have played, and if you like some good hack'n'slash action, Dungeon Siege is a great game for you. When you start out, you are a farmhand whose farm has been attacked. Your mentor is killed by the viscous Krug, and tells you to go to the nearby town and help out with the invasion. You start the game equipped with a knife, and soon find some spell scrolls nearby.

From here, your character can branch out into any direction that you desire. In Dungeon Siege, there are four main branches of combat: Melee, Ranged, Combat Magic, and Nature Magic. As you use a particular fighting style, your skill with that style improves and you can level up. As you level up, you do more damage (and if you are a mage you can learn better spells).

In addition to the four schools of combat, there are three stats that each character has: Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. These are tied to the schools of combat: Using melee combat raises your strength a lot, using ranged combat raises your dexterity, and using magic raises your intelligence. As these three stats rise, your character is able to equip more powerful items. Some armor sets might require 20 strength to wear, so to be able to use them you must train in melee combat.

One of the neat things about this system is the amount of customization it allows. You as a player can mix and match classes as much as you want. If you wanted to use a sorcerer who could wear heavy armor, you could train in both melee combat and combat magic. Since this would raise your strength and intelligence, respectively, you would be able to cast powerful spells as well as use heavy armor.

I found combat and nature magic to be very neat schools. To cast spells, all a character needs is a spell scroll, which can be bought at a vendor or found lying around while adventuring. The character puts this scroll into their spell book, and can then cast the spell for a certain mana cost. The spells get progressively more powerful as the character levels up. I also enjoyed the immense variety among spells - the schools have everything from summoning spells, to healing, to buffs, to cataclysmic explosions that will decimate your enemies in seconds. As you have probably guessed, combat magic is more focused on damage output, and nature magic is more focused on healing and buffing/debuffing.

Melee and ranged combat, however, I found much less intuitive and exciting than magic. Here's the basic battle order: Point. Click. Wait till you kill the bad guy. In melee and ranged combat, there are no special moves or abilities - you just attack until the target is dead. This made playing a solo melee character very boring - there was little or no variety among the combat, turning the game into a potion-fest.

Fortunately, you are allowed to have up to 8 characters in a party, so you can have all the variety you want with your mages while the melee characters act as tanks. In the end, I chose two swordsmen (one of which could use ranged weapons well), a combat mage, and a nature mage as my group.

Despite the ability to mix up party members, I found it difficult to keep my nature mage high in levels. Since experience is based off of damage dealt to opponents, and nature mages focus on buffs and healing, it was very hard to keep him level with my fighters, who constantly dealt damage. The result was an imbalanced party that had a hard time beating the final boss. A little solo fighting with my nature mage fixed the situation, but a more intuitive experience division system would be in order.

The gameplay is relatively straightforward - I have mentioned the term dungeon-crawler, and that's basically what this game is. You run around, kill stuff, and collect treasure. A neat aspect of the game was the ability to buy pack mules - creatures with an enormous inventory space that could tote treasure around that didn't fit in your character's backpacks. They could also carry potions - a much-needed item for melee characters.

I also enjoyed the ability to set behaviors for my characters. I could tell them whether to attack enemies on sight, or hold their ground, or stay out of combat. This was especially useful for my pack mule, which had a tendency to charge into combat and get slaughtered until I ordered him not to engage enemies.

Last, but not least, Dungeon Siege has incredible graphics. The 3D character and spell rendering system in the game is amazing, and allows for very fluid motions, as well as some very impressive spell effects. In addition, many of the environments are breathtaking - rickety bridges above shimmering blue falls, precarious stone ledges suspended over a snowy landscape - many of the scenes from the game were some of the most memorable things I have ever seen in a game. Unfortunately, there is a flip side to this: When you are not outdoors, the graphics are slightly monotonous. Dungeon-crawling caverns are vast, and can end up being monotonous.

Another graphical element that I didn't like was the character's physical appearance. Try as I might, I could not get a character that I thought looked good. Even with armor on, I often looked silly - the armor sets are not designed for style, and if you truly want to look cool you are forced to compromise your power by equipping under-level gear.

Despite this, the neat environments and interesting gameplay style of Dungeon Siege made it worthwhile. Although some places were indeed breathtaking, others were not - and the horrid plot of the game dulled it considerably. However, for the casual gamer who likes to bop baddies on the head, this is definitely an option. The good, dungeon-crawling fun of Dungeon Siege will keep you interested. For a while.