However, locks can and will be made conveniently unpickable at the creator's convenience. Removing traps and picking locks consists of a simplistic mini-game, and the connection between the skills and how this game is made any easier is never explained. The mini-map offers no information beyond itself, a big boon to the enemy creatures and their unsophisticated, yet effective, tactics.
Communication with NPCs does not consist of your having any complete lines you can speak only in keywords. It seems that creatures can block your attacks at any point in their attack animation, while you can only block if your shield's up and the collision detection engine senses it as in the way. There is no tutorial, a very poor in-game manual, and significant issues with collision detection that can cause your attacks to fail even after you master the basics. However, the scheme is twisted off the norm just enough to be frustrating to fans of either genre. Dungeon Lords is a third-person-shooter control scheme, which sounds good in the context of an Action RPG. Unfortunately, it is one of the few things that does work favorably from a gameplay standpoint. White this isn't an example of good graphics, it actually works in your favor from a gameplay perspective. Also, consider that there is no splashing of water, that arrows stuck in your body disappear with no fadeout or anything similar, and that your character and his foes can and do stand on thin air. Plants look like two-dimensional objects thrown together, and graphical glitches mar the game, with the camera getting stuck behind walls or under your character's head. In spite of the relatively simple models and having well over the recommended requirements, my machine still offered a low framerate when anything other than the character and dungeon were on the screen. The polygon models are proficient for 2002 standards for the character, and a good bit less for everything else. The first thing you will notice about Dungeon Lords is the sub-par graphical quality. Ranging from glitchy, blocky, generally bad graphics, to gameplay which feels overly simple yet nigh incomprehensible, to all sorts of lesser issues that could have been fixed by taking one look at the game versus any other Action RPG released in the past four or five years, Dungeon Lords is an disappointing title, failing in every area where its competition succeeds.
For every Knights of the Old Republic, a Dungeon Lords. For every brilliant, genre-defining RPG, there are around 10 average but fun romps, and one or two truly abysmal works.