Genre: RPG
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Kuju
Release Date: February 2007

Back in the day, SSI put out a series of turn-based strategy games on the PC that were based on Dungeons & Dragons. Pool of Radiance, Champions of Krynn, and their respective sequels all ran on the same engine, adapting the first-edition AD&D rules to make for some impressively difficult strategic action.

Dungeons & Dragons Tactics revisits that concept, creating a turn-based strategy game that works much like a virtual simulation of the tabletop game’s combat engine. It was pitched as “X-Com meets D&D on the PSP,” and it lives up to that concept. With a party of six adventurers you create, you’ll be able to take them through forty-two different adventures, with, supposedly, more than a hundred hours of gameplay. It’s been the pet project and a “work of passion” of the British developer Kuju since December of 2005.

Kuju claims that D&D Tactics is the “most authentic interpretation of the D&D 3.5 ruleset” to ever find its way into a video game. You can create a party of six adventurers using a point-buy system a lot like what was found in Knights of the Old Republic. All eleven standard D&D character classes are available – fighter, sorcerer, wizard, cleric, druid, bard, paladin, ranger, monk, barbarian, and rogue – as well as the psion and psychic warrior.

All of the standard races are also available for character creation, so you can make human, elven, dwarven, halfling, gnomish, half-orcish, or half-elven adventurers, complete with the special abilities each race possesses. This is a big part of the game, really, because you spend a lot of time within it dungeon-delving, which means light and darkness are also a major part of the game. You’ll want characters with low-light or darkvision in order to succeed, or at least to avoid getting ambushed every time you turn around.

The game, which isn’t set in any specific campaign world, includes more than a hundred of D&D’s trademarked monsters, such as mind flayers, beholders, frost giants, and dracoliches. You’ll also be able to use two hundred sixteen spells, with the possibility of more on the way; twenty-four skills; forty-one psionic abilities; forty-eight psionic feats; six hundred fifty-five pieces of equipment; and plenty of downloadable content, the ability to download which will be unlocked by the choices you make over the course of the campaign. Yes, you can opt to be either good or evil; it’s up to you. Further, the game is set up to tie into Wizards of the Coast’s Year of the Dragon promotion for 2007, so you can expect quite a few full-scale dragonslaying adventures.

In the unlikely event you run out of singleplayer game, D&D Tactics will ship with three separate multiplayer modes. There’s Last Man Standing, of course, with tactical battles between up to four parties; Treasure Hunt, which allows you to search a dungeon for fat loots or pummel it out of your competitors; and gladitorial mode, where you compete to kill as many monsters as possible.

On a sadly personal note, I’ve been wanting a company to remake the old SSI gold-box games for years now, and D&D Tactics seems like it’s as close as I’m going to get. The enthusiasm of the developers for the project really shines through, and once they’ve added a few much-needed layers of polish, it looks like this could be that rarest of creatures: a solid PSP title.