I apparently don't value my time at all, because who else could write a longish review of Dark Alliance, let alone play it to completion.
4-player co-op review:
I completed the game in around 11.5 hours with 3 brothers on the highest difficulty; two on PC and two on series X and S.
Miraculously I think we only had 2 disconnects or crashes between us. We didn't have to do any weird workarounds to finish the game, the exception being that the in game voice would randomly stop working between certain party members, and when disabling it to use Xbox party chat, the in game voice would still reactivate after every mission on PC.
Most of the fun was had making fun of the jank and doing dumb co-op stuff with my super easy going bros. Almost nothing works as expected, itemisation is dull, the story didn't register on any of us, the characters displayed no character. Every aspect of Dark Alliance is incomplete or outright bad.
If you can get 4 jank-loving people together on gamepass, and can't find ANY other game to play together, you can have 6 hours of fun-ish. Otherwise, it's a rip off, even for free.
4-player co-op review:
I completed the game in around 11.5 hours with 3 brothers on the highest difficulty; two on PC and two on series X and S.
Miraculously I think we only had 2 disconnects or crashes between us. We didn't have to do any weird workarounds to finish the game, the exception being that the in game voice would randomly stop working between certain party members, and when disabling it to use Xbox party chat, the in game voice would still reactivate after every mission on PC.
For the first half of the game, combat was kind of fun just because of the sheer jankfest and co-op chaos. Enemies teleporting and rubber banding everywhere, lacking hit response by monsters, one shots everywhere, frantically trying to revive or exploit the unlimited respawn mechanic when things went to shit.
The mission structure is quite repetitive with the same 3 traps (timed ground spikes, wall flames, assorted ground hazards) used everywhere. Optional objectives could require you to find 20 hidden items, often leading to a 19/20 at the end of the mission.
The environments look pretty, but the characters are a mess, animations don't blend well, moves don't blend well and player motion constantly reconfigures time and space, sliding, t-posing and teleporting to oblivion. The same applies to enemies, with the added bonus of almost non existent AI increasing the jank further.
The mission structure is quite repetitive with the same 3 traps (timed ground spikes, wall flames, assorted ground hazards) used everywhere. Optional objectives could require you to find 20 hidden items, often leading to a 19/20 at the end of the mission.
The environments look pretty, but the characters are a mess, animations don't blend well, moves don't blend well and player motion constantly reconfigures time and space, sliding, t-posing and teleporting to oblivion. The same applies to enemies, with the added bonus of almost non existent AI increasing the jank further.
Controls are a complete mess. Most attacks aim where your camera aims, but many abilities would go off in the direction your character was pointing. The game has very strange input buffering when it shouldn't, and no buffering where you'd expect. Animation canceling could be done by dodging, but seemed to randomly work with only certain abilities and attacks without logic to it.
Important inputs like reviving or climbing a ladder require you to stand completely still for a few seconds for the prompt to show, and required no other input at the same time to be able to activate. With network latency combined with a lack of input buffering, revives and ladders felt like performing surgery .
Pulling off some of the learned combos felt at times random. You could do it 10 times in a row in the lobby area, then fail to pull it off once during a mission. Attempting to time blocks/parries was a crapshoot due to latency and poor buffering.
Important inputs like reviving or climbing a ladder require you to stand completely still for a few seconds for the prompt to show, and required no other input at the same time to be able to activate. With network latency combined with a lack of input buffering, revives and ladders felt like performing surgery .
Pulling off some of the learned combos felt at times random. You could do it 10 times in a row in the lobby area, then fail to pull it off once during a mission. Attempting to time blocks/parries was a crapshoot due to latency and poor buffering.
The impact of character abilities was low and lacked adequate explaination. The tutorial barely explains stuff. Ultimate abilities are not described anywhere in game (perhaps on the character select screen? Can't remember).
The game has 30 different status effects that aren't explained anywhere. There's even a legend that shows every icon with a name, but not what they do (didn't check for tooltips on this page, tooltips were quite good other places).
The game has 30 different status effects that aren't explained anywhere. There's even a legend that shows every icon with a name, but not what they do (didn't check for tooltips on this page, tooltips were quite good other places).
Attacks are wildly unbalanced. Some special abilities would be outdamaged by basic attacks and animation lock you. Some learned basic combo moves could outdamage the ultimate abilities.
The special "interact" combo where you have to press the interact button after hitting something, did more damage than most ults at 1/4 the cost of your ult meter. This "interact" combo also seemed to randomly work or not work, despite having enough ult meter and doing the same move you combo'd it after a million times over.
The special "interact" combo where you have to press the interact button after hitting something, did more damage than most ults at 1/4 the cost of your ult meter. This "interact" combo also seemed to randomly work or not work, despite having enough ult meter and doing the same move you combo'd it after a million times over.
The loot system was a pain to interact with. All of the unique stats came from set bonuses. Every item is part of a set, with bonus thresholds at 3, 5 and 8 set items equipped. Ultimately, these set bonuses were meaningless because you outlevel the content with just basic item stats anyway.
The sorting interface reverted to default after every mission. When sorting by set bonus to sell the worst of each set item, the list would rearrange the order of sorted sets after selling each item.
Items have random basic attribute bonuses; the amount of stats and number ranges improved by rarity.
Legendary items don't have unique abilities, only bigger numbers.
We had lvl 5(max) gear after the third full mission. This gear didn't have to be replaced for the entirety of the game. Occasionally you'd get a rarity upgrade that fit, but even legendaries don't have any interesting stats, only more of the basic stats with higher numbers (launch Diablo 3 flashback).
We pretty much maxed out characters, abilities and items around the halfway mark.
At this point the combat was trivially easy and we didn't need any more upgrades. We speedran the final 3 missions since there was no progression left and the combat had gotten stale and we tired of the game.
The sorting interface reverted to default after every mission. When sorting by set bonus to sell the worst of each set item, the list would rearrange the order of sorted sets after selling each item.
Items have random basic attribute bonuses; the amount of stats and number ranges improved by rarity.
Legendary items don't have unique abilities, only bigger numbers.
We had lvl 5(max) gear after the third full mission. This gear didn't have to be replaced for the entirety of the game. Occasionally you'd get a rarity upgrade that fit, but even legendaries don't have any interesting stats, only more of the basic stats with higher numbers (launch Diablo 3 flashback).
We pretty much maxed out characters, abilities and items around the halfway mark.
At this point the combat was trivially easy and we didn't need any more upgrades. We speedran the final 3 missions since there was no progression left and the combat had gotten stale and we tired of the game.
Most of the fun was had making fun of the jank and doing dumb co-op stuff with my super easy going bros. Almost nothing works as expected, itemisation is dull, the story didn't register on any of us, the characters displayed no character. Every aspect of Dark Alliance is incomplete or outright bad.
If you can get 4 jank-loving people together on gamepass, and can't find ANY other game to play together, you can have 6 hours of fun-ish. Otherwise, it's a rip off, even for free.
One out of four.
