It's not often that you start losing track of all the ways a game can disappoint you, which is what happened throughout the entirety of our time with the new co-op "action-RPG" Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance.

A snippet from our full review.

Releasing a game before it's ready is akin to pulling something out of the oven before ingredients are given the proper time to cook. And seeing as we’re currently in the ‘Day One Patch’ timeline, where final bits of polish happen in the days prior to a game’s launch and for the weeks following, the best you can hope for is a little bit of extra seasoning required. In keeping with the food analogy, that’s in reference to those final bits required to bring the whole dish together. A performance bump, glitches sorted, bugs squashed. Peas ready.

As seen with games like Cyberpunk 2077, sometimes the oven timer needs to be set for another year - to let those delicious ingredients properly bake. In the case of the technical mess that is Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance, the entire dish needs to be thrown out. With the oven deep-cleaned so its residue doesn’t find its way into your next meal.

Dark Alliance’s problems go beyond enemies zipping around arenas and ragdolling randomly at breakneck speed into walls. Though, a lot of that can be quite funny. It fails to do basic things like scale difficulty for solo and group play, or do the normal thing of not giving ranged mage-like enemies drastically higher physical-defence ratings than large hulking brutes. There are so many things half-baked, broken, glitchy, or simply baffling it’s almost commendable.

Our Full Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance Review