Genre : RPG
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Gas Powered Games
Release Date: October 30, 2006

I always admire the cojones of a publisher that releases a game like Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony. By giving the game a subtitle like that, it opens the door for all manner of professional nimrods to come up with headlines that play off of it.

I am only a semiprofessional nimrod. Thus I will point out that I could try for the play on words, but I’m not going to. Respect that.

I am also playing the part of the console-gaming layman here, as I’ve never played Dungeon Siege before now. Thus, I can’t speak to how it stacks up against its PC brethren. What I can tell you is that Throne of Agony is a top-down dungeon crawler in the same vein as Sony’s notoriously underwhelming Untold Legends series, and it is a PSP game, which means that the load times are somewhat longer than they perhaps should be, and that you will spend a hilarious amount of time shooting at monsters you cannot see.

Throne of Agony doesn’t share many of UL’s shortcomings, though; it has clearer graphics, a friendlier inventory screen, the presence of handy pets to back you up from the word “go,” and – although I cannot prove this – a character designer who is not legally blind.

You can play Throne of Agony as one of three characters. Mogrim the half-giant is coming to the Broken Lands to look for a way to save his people from extinction; Allister is a former Battle Mage who is following his lover Sedara into hostile territory; and Serin, the Shadow Stalker, a blind shadow elf searching for the meaning behind her maddening prophetic visions. In short, we’ve got the big beefy guy, the balanced guy, and the really fast chick who can stab somebody sixteen times before they hit her back. Solid. Each character can also take on one of six different advanced classes, allowing you to choose their development and customize each one as you see fit.

Each character also comes with one of two possible followers, who can help your adventure by making up for your character’s shortcomings. These are basically permanent NPCs who run around with you in dungeons, casting spells and attacking as they see fit. They don’t do much besides backing up your offensive, but that, in its way, is their sublime genius. They don’t blunder into enemy attacks, fall off of ledges, or burn all your healing potions; they just occasionally kick the crap out of things.

In short, Throne of Agony avoids most of the traditional pitfalls of the dungeon crawler. It’s not too easy but it’s not brainbustingly hard, there’s a lot of replay value (with three characters, a high level cap, eighteen classes, an unlockable difficulty setting, a cadre of followers, and multiplayer mode, the game is over when you damn well decide it is), and the setting is well-imagined. The locations have a lot of personality and the Broken Lands are nicely tragic and epic at the same time.

Most of the problems the game has, in fact, are problems endemic to the PlayStation Portable. The load times are abysmal; in the time it takes me to travel from the overworld to a dungeon, or vice versa, I could go out and get a good start on my own adventuring career. The game also likes to briefly freeze up every so often as I’m exploring an area, and navigating the menus is harder than it has to be because sometimes, the buttons don’t seem like they work.

The small screen and large size of the character also work against the game to some extent. If you’re playing a character that isn’t a straightforward melee build, you’ll spend a great deal of Throne of Agony firing at offscreen enemies. The game makes this as easy as it can; you can spot enemies on the automap well before they come onscreen, allowing you to buff up or get in the first hit relatively painlessly.

At the same time, however, the enemies in Throne of Agony are rock stupid. You will often actually have to sit there and consciously try to aggro more than one of them at a time. Individually, they tend to be a pretty good match for your character, which means the dungeons are often less like pitched running melees, and more like some kind of bizarre endurance trial.

This also means that when you do manage to aggro more than one of them at a time, such as when bosses show up, you are in serious trouble. This leads to a sort of uneven difficulty curve, where sometimes Throne of Agony will seem like everything is patiently waiting for you to finish with its friends before it takes you on, and sometimes, it will seem like the angsty black hammer of Satan came out of nowhere to squash you flat.

For all that, though, Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony is a decent dungeon crawler. If you’re a fan of these kinds of games, this is a good one, and if you’re not, this will not be the one that changes your mind. It’s a well-done take on a relatively standard formula.

Score: 8.0/10