Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is an action role playing game, developed by Capcom. The original game was released on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013, before the game was finally ported to PC in January 2016.

The game starts with your character being super overpowered, with really rare equipment and dealing tons of damage, giving you a sneak peak into the type of end game content you have to come. But yes, you do get nerfed back down to the regular level 1 RPG character, in your rags and sticks for swords. You are able to choose between a number of different classes, or vocations as they are called in DD. On top of being in control of your character, you will also gain a party of up to three more “pawns”, these too take on specific roles in the group, such as tanks, damage and healers. I found this to be a really nice addition to the game as I wasn’t expecting such mechanics from an RPG game like this. The party controls and management system is basic at best, but the AI is fairly in tune with what they should be doing, and the two basic controls, attack and follow, are both really responsive as well.

The combat system in DD against the smaller style of enemies is very generic hack and slash, there is no real special combos or special abilities to come across, The warrior class is probably the most basic class to play, but is probably the one I would recommend for your first play through. Where DD’s combat system really comes into its own, is when you get to scale larger enemies, such as giants, and cyclops. This allows you to climb onto enemies backs and swing at them to deal more damage. This is a feature that I haven’t really seen incorporated into combat systems in recent memory, the last time I remember coming across it is in Shadow of the Colossus.

You can definitely tell this game was ported from the consoles as the graphics are average at best. The game is pretty poorly optimized as even though the graphics didn’t look brilliant, I wasn’t able to get the full 4k effect. The character models look pretty good once you get some more interesting looking armour and weapons to equip. Animation across the game is of a high standard though, with the regular combat hack and slash animations looking very cool when you can couple a few attacks together. You can get some really nice visual effects through the draw distance of the PC version of the game being superior, with some really nice looking environments when you are out in the open world. This is a game which is completely voice acted, all to a really high standard as well.

DD is a pretty hard game, even on the lower difficulty throughs, you will have challenges. You can really run into high level enemies without realizing it’s too late and your attacks do no damage at all.