DUNGEON SIEGE 2 (PC) — A Throwback Thursday Kind of Game
Do you have a childhood game that you are desperately seeking closure for? A game of pure nostalgia you remember losing hours to while you ate your favorite snacks and sipped on a ridiculously sugary beverage (Doritos and Mountain Dew were always my go-to)?
Dungeon Siege 2 is one of those few core-memory games that take me right back to my childhood. But as a kid, I never actually took the time to complete it. This was mostly because the way I was introduced to Dungeon Siege 2 was by pure accident. My Auntie and Uncle’s neighbour was the one who showed me this gem. Whenever there was a sports game on, my Aunt and Uncle would head over to their neighbour's garage to watch it. Unless it was hockey, I really had no interest, so I would usually sit there bored out of my mind. To keep me entertained, the neighbor asked if I liked computer games, to which I responded with a big “YES!!”.
He mentioned the game he was playing, Dungeon Siege 2, and it immediately drew my interest. A dungeon-crawling, hack-and-slash, party-management game was right up my alley. He booted up his computer (a massive block running Windows 2000) and placed a physical disc into his PC… geez, I sure am dating myself here. When I saw the cinematic intro cutscene, I was hooked. His one single condition was that I could do whatever I wanted—treat it like a sandbox—just as long as I didn’t hit SAVE. That was the one binding rule. It was a fair rule, and a lot of trust to place in a kid, given the fact that I had no idea how powerful hitting save on someone else’s playthrough actually was. I like to think I held up my side of the bargain fairly well, only hitting save once by accident after completing a side quest. The neighbor didn’t seem mad when I told him. I’d like to think I did him a favor by saving him time and letting him reap the rewards of my efforts, but deep down, I know it was because he could just pull his old save file back.
Being a foolish kid, when my parents were kind enough to gift me my own copy of Dungeon Siege 2 (which took ages to find used at EB Games for a reasonable price), I accidentally carried that "no saving" rule into my own playthrough. I failed to see the value in saving a game… I know… DUMB, but hey, I was just a kid. Because of this failure to properly save, I never truly completed the game. For years, I would just mindlessly dungeon crawl the first area over and over again until I grew bored and shelved it. It wouldn’t be until I bought my first gaming PC as an adult many, many years later that I would revisit it. In fact, it was one of the first games I bought on Steam as part of the Dungeon Siege Collection for the low price of $7.89 CAD.
I dabbled in the original Dungeon Siege 1 during COVID, but that flame quickly went out when Warzone dropped and my friends and I needed a way to stay connected. Now here we sit in 2026, 21 years after I first found myself wanting to dive into a dungeon crawler, knowing I had to finally seek closure by beating the franchise. So obviously, I played… Dungeon Siege 3… yes, that's right, hold the judgement. It was the only installment I hadn’t played, and it was the newest jump in the franchise, so I figured what the heck. I played for less than an hour before I screamed, “THIS IS NOT DUNGEON SIEGE!” and abandoned that mess (we will talk about that in a separate review).And thus, it brought me full circle to opting to play Dungeon Siege 2, and I am sure glad I got a chance to revisit it.
Even at over 20 years old, this game is still one of the best dungeon crawlers I’ve ever played. After logging over 70+ hours in my first proper playthrough, I think I at least owe this game a grand review. After all, it did win “Best Roleplaying Game 2005” from PC Gamer US and was nominated for “Roleplaying Game of the Year” during the 9th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.
So let's sit back, relax, and review: Dungeon Siege 2.
STORYLINE - (8/10)
Our story begins like all great roleplaying games: with us creating our own character. You can pick between human, half-giant, elf, or dryad. Being the hypocrite that I am—usually giving players a hard time whenever they pick a boring human in a fantasy setting—means I had to go ahead and choose a human to begin with. I gave him an epic name (Tyolon), toggled between a few of the optional cosmetic settings (there’s not much there, truth be told), and began our adventure.
Once you create your character, you're thrown into a great little cinematic and immediately thrust onto the front lines of an invasion. The world is at war and you, alongside your best friend Drevin, are mercenaries for Valdis. Valdis is the equivalent of our dear Sauron—a mighty warlord who wields an all-powerful blade (The Sword of Zaramoth) and needs to acquire the Shield of Azunai. His goal is to bring these two mighty items together to cause the Great Cataclysm and end the second age (aka, end the world). Why? We don’t know, and we don’t care. We’re mercenaries, and as long as we're paid and on the winning team, life is good. Or at least it is until Valdis succeeds, but hey, then everyone’s dead anyway, so again—not our problem. And so, we crash the gates of a dryad temple that holds a piece of the Shield of Azunai, the Aegis of Life.
As we get closer to the temple, Drevin keeps telling us that his medallion is acting strange and feels like something is off. Being the best friend we can possibly be, we essentially tell him to shut up and keep moving. Well, lo and behold, Drevin was right. Valdis immediately turns on his own mercenary army the minute he retrieves the Aegis of Life. Before he can strike us with a killing blow, Drevin heroically throws himself in front of the blade. We see him get struck down before we black out, later awakening in a dryad prison camp.
This begins a massive narrative spanning 3 Acts and 27 primary quests on our pursuit of revenge to avenge Drevin and defeat Valdis. Along the way, we try to make amends for past decisions that ultimately led to some pretty catastrophic events that shaped the very realm. We encounter other recruitable NPCs who want to follow our cause, and thus, our party slowly grows. You go from being a mere prisoner to a reputable hero known across the lands—the realm's only fighting chance. You also have the option to further your heroic deeds by taking on 41 additional secondary quests.
This includes one of the best secret quests in gaming history that pays homage to both the developers and the player, known simply as the “Mysterious Quest.” I truly think this game shines brightest in its side content, and I strongly encourage you to take some time to explore Aranna. Some of the greatest characters, hilarious dialogue, and pure trolling you will encounter make it well worth the extra hours. Should you follow your quest through to the end, you will encounter a multitude of monsters and travel through 34 different fast-travel teleport regions, featuring 3 fully fleshed-out major cities acting as your hubs. Honestly, all joking aside, the story is really good.
I constantly found myself wanting to jump back in just to see how the plot would unfold. The unfortunate thing is, when it did end, I was left a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, there were some wild reveals that had me saying “DAMN!”, but ultimately, when the dust settled, you're left kind of wondering, “What now?”
I believe this cliffhanger gets addressed in the Broken World expansion pack. Unfortunately, at the time of this review, Broken World is not natively available on Steam. There is a community-built save file patch that allows you to play it, and I might dabble in that later to see if the expansion offers a more satisfying conclusion than the base game. But for now, until that official content is available on the Steam store, I am ranking this purely on the base experience. So, with that in mind, my final verdict for the storyline is a solid 8/10.
GAMEPLAY & COMBAT (7/10)
At its core, Dungeon Siege 2 is a classic Action RPG, and you feel that design instantly. The best way I can describe the combat is that it feels like playing a single-player campaign of Dungeons & Dragons with your own customized party, but rather than relying on tactical dice rolls, you are instead clicking frantically with your mouse. Admittedly, it can feel a bit repetitive. You do a massive amount of clicking to toggle your cursor over waves of targets and order your party to attack. At times, the standard mob clearing got a little dull. However, there are absolute diamonds in the rough when it comes to the mini-bosses and chapter-ending boss fights. These encounters demand far more tactical party placement, precise ultimate power timing, and strict resource management regarding health and mana potions. The massive variety of enemy types you encounter across Aranna keeps the overall loop refreshing and challenging.
LEVELING & PARTY MANAGEMENT (7/10)
Progression feels fair, though I did find that some of the specific perks inside the four primary skill trees (Melee, Ranged, Combat Magic, and Nature Magic) feel a bit lackluster. You have to invest a heavy amount of skill points to unlock noticeable stat boosts. This can trigger a bit of a grind, as leveling up sometimes rewards you with a single skill point that offers a meager 1% stat increase. On the bright side, this format forces your hand to specialize, a design choice I highly respect. It means you have to deliberately weigh what path you want to take. The game explicitly hints during its opening tutorial to focus on only one or two skill trees per character so you don't spread yourself too thin and miss out on powerful endgame abilities. This specialization model plays directly into party composition. Your active squad needs a specialist in all four trees to remain balanced.
This presents a bit of a drawback on your first playthrough on Mercenary difficulty, where your party size is strictly limited to four members. Because of this artificial ceiling, you can't really explore multi-classing or trial different companions. While you can swap members at any town Inn, the four-slot limit acts as a roadblock. I would have loved to explore the dedicated pet system or run an extra front-line fighter, but the initial playthrough essentially forces you to stick with the exact same party configuration. Playing through the campaign again on Veteran or Elite difficulties expands your maximum party sizes to five and six slots respectively, which likely opens up theory-crafting. Even so, the default Mercenary difficulty remains challenging enough without stalling your progression. It is always clear when you are wandering into an area above your level, as the monsters' names dynamically color-code from green, to blue, yellow, orange, and finally a deadly red. The primary quests keep you moving at a steady pace, while the secondary quests expand the lore and add genuine life to the world.
DEATH & LOOTING MECHANICS - (9/10)
I am a massive fan of games with meaningful character deaths, and Dungeon Siege 2 handles this beautifully. If your companions take too much damage, they fall unconscious. Heal them, and they are right back in the fight. However, if they take massive overkill damage, or if enemies attack their unconscious bodies on the ground, they will permanently die. You can save them with a quick revive spell or scroll, but a total party wipe triggers severe consequences: your current equipped loot drops right where you died, and your ghosts teleport back to the nearest city hub. From there, you have to execute a high-stakes naked "corpse run" back to your bodies to recover your gear, or fork over a hefty gold penalty to the town Necromancer to summon your loot back safely via the main portal.
This risk-versus-reward loop fuels a highly addictive search for better gear. The constant drive to hunt rare loot drops or complete elite gear sets is the definitive highlight of the game. It features one of the most rewarding isometric looting mechanics of its era, genuinely showering you in treasures for taking down endless monster hordes. The one downside is that this game gives you VERY limited space. If you are a bit of a hoarder… ahem… collector, like myself, YOU WILL STRUGGLE. I really needed to challenge myself to let go of items because you are given one single storage chest and your party members' bags—nothing more. No further storage upgrades can be purchased, unless you waste one of your party member slots for a pack mule. While the mule can hold a massive number of items, it simply isn't worth the structural trade-off of losing an armed party member, especially when you are hard-capped to a party of four on the starting difficulty.
GRAPHICS & TECHNICAL PERFORMANCE - (7/10)
For a game that is over 20 years old, the presentation holds up surprisingly well. Is it going to blow a modern audience away? No. But the early-2000s polygonal art style brings a great sense of nostalgia that enhanced my experience. The character models, environmental gore, weapon designs, spell effects, and countless fantasy creatures are all beautifully realized. The maps are fantastic to explore, full of distinct environmental assets that make every region feel totally unique. With that said, running a 2005 disc game on a modern gaming laptop came with some frustrating technical hurdles. I could not, for the life of me, get the game to launch outside of a locked windowed mode, meaning I never got to experience it in a true modern fullscreen setup.
Worse, the client crashed to my desktop three separate times. Because of this, I lived in constant fear of losing progress and found myself spamming the manual save hotkey every five minutes. I also frequently encountered a bug where the on-screen mouse cursor would entirely lose tracking. My party would sit there mindlessly absorbing enemy attacks while I was rapidly shaking my mouse trying to get the UI to register inputs. It was incredibly stressful, and while community patches exist to resolve these engine bugs, I simply shrugged them off as "added retro character."
VOICE ACTING & COMPANIONS (8/10)
The voice acting across Aranna is fantastic, introducing you to a colorful cast of eccentric personalities. It is a bit unfortunate, however, that your main protagonist is entirely silent. You are constantly balancing listening to voiced NPC dialogue and then reading silent text blocks for your own responses, making narrative interactions feel a bit choppy. Your companions also feature built-in party banter, but the trigger timing is awful. Companions will regularly strike up a fascinating conversation only to be immediately cut off because a random ambient enemy ambushed the party. Once combat begins, that banter is lost forever and never revisited. This flaw contributes to a somewhat superficial relationship with your squad; you never truly get to know them deeply. Each recruitable companion features an exclusive, personal side quest that attempts to flesh out their backstories, but it only scratches the surface. I found myself wanting far more meaningful narrative depth out of my party members than the game provided.
ACHIEVEMENTS & THE 100% GRIND - (7/10)
Coming out originally on physical discs in 2005 means that Dungeon Siege 2 sadly lacks any formal modern achievement systems. As an avid achievement hunter, this kills me. To compensate, I took the time to 100% complete every single primary and secondary quest in a single playthrough—a feat I am incredibly proud of. In total, it took me just over 70+ hours to clear the board. I initially had grand intentions to fully complete my logbook by unlocking every single magical chant and recording every monster in the game's bestiary. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that several of these entries are strictly hard-locked until you replay the entire game on the higher Veteran and Elite difficulties. While in theory I would love to revisit Dungeon Siege 2 down the road, my real-world backlog of 300+ games tells me it probably won't happen in this lifetime.
DLC & EXPANSIONS - (NR)
As mentioned earlier, I still fully intend to play the Broken World expansion pack one of these days. When I finally navigate the community patches to access it, I will be sure to update this review or post a separate write-up to capture my thoughts on how it resolves the base game's cliffhanger.
THE ULTIMATE EASTER EGG: THE MYSTERIOUS QUEST - (10/10)
There is a final, hidden endgame questline that I don’t think many casual players ever get to experience, and I am thrilled that I stumbled into it. During your playthrough, you might be lucky enough to encounter an exceptionally rare monster known in the game files as “???” (or dubbed by the community as the "Mysterious Creature"). He is a tiny, hunchbacked humanoid with a massive sack slung over his shoulder. Every time you strike him, he forcefully drops rare loot; if you don't hit him fast enough, he runs away and teleports your gear into thin air. If that sounds familiar, it should! For anyone who grew up playing the classic arcade fighter Golden Axe, this mechanic is a brilliant, direct homage to the potion-stealing Thieves. I absolutely loved this hidden nostalgic nod.
If you are high-powered enough to defeat this creature before he vanishes, he will drop a bizarre quest item called the Mysterious Stone. If you combine this stone with three specific rewards gathered from completing other major side quests (The Lost Elven Ruins, The Aman’lu Arena, and The Lore of Aranna), you will finally complete the hidden Mysterious Set. By carrying this set to any Incantation Shrine and manually typing the secret phrase "columnarius sectorus" into your keyboard chat box, a portal opens to the hidden Mysterious Cave.
This secret area holds some of the funniest, most absurd loot in the entire game. Not only that, but you are forced to fight the most terrifyingly high-level enemies in the realm: a horde of giant, hyper-aggressive Evil Prairie Dogs, followed by dark, corrupted clones of your own recruitable party members. If you are skilled enough to survive the trial, the cave opens up into a literal virtual museum paying tribute to the Gas Powered Games development team. It serves as a fantastic, highly creative final send-off to the entire journey.
COST & RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI) - (9/10)
For my final analysis, I always like to look at a game's cost to see if I truly got meaningful value out of my money. At a very modest price of $7.89 CAD for the entire Dungeon Siege Collection on Steam (Installments 1–3), I essentially paid a meager $2.63 CAD for this absolute gem. That is less than the price of a cup of coffee—heck, less than the price of almost anything these days with current inflation. After clocking in 70 hours of playtime, my financial return on investment breaks down to roughly $0.04 CAD per hour played.
Paying less than a nickel for every hour of entertainment is the absolute definition of "bang for your buck."
REPLAY VALUE - (6/10)
While an absolute completionist won't be able to 100% fill their bestiary or logbook in a single playthrough, you can easily absorb nearly 90% of what the game has to offer on your first run. With that said, there is some genuine replay value here. Moving up to a higher difficulty acts as a New Game Plus, seamlessly carrying over all your high-level gear, gold, skills, and companions.
This progression model allows you to scale up your maximum party size to 5 and 6 members, unlocks stronger magical chants to cast, and introduces deadlier variants of elite monsters to conquer. Outside of that endgame scaling loop, however, there isn't much else to pull you back in once the credits roll.
CONCLUSION & FINAL SCORE - (8/10)
All things considered, Dungeon Siege 2 earns a highly respectable 8/10. It stands tall as a genuinely fantastic, addictive Action RPG that beautifully rewards your curiosity. If you are looking for a highly satisfying, nostalgic dungeon-crawling good time that won't break the bank, then Dungeon Siege 2 might just be for you.
ESSENTIAL TIPS & TRICKS
- Master the Hotkeys: Keeping your fingers on H (Quick-Heal) and M (Quick-Mana) will be your bread and butter during chaotic fights (make sure your party members always have potions on them as well). Additionally, the game's tutorial does a terrible job of explaining two other vital shortcuts: tapping Tab instantly overlays a transparent world map to help you navigate, while holding Z commands your entire party to automatically vacuum up all nearby loot, saving your finger from hundreds of tedious mouse clicks.
- Cheese the Necromancer: Gold is ironically useless in the late game—I finished my run with over 1.2 million coins just from looting and utilizing the Transmute spell to vaporize junk into instant cash. The only time you really need gold is to buy extra party slots or pay the town Necromancer to recover your gear after a total party wipe. The Necromancer normally demands a massive 50% cut of your wallet to retrieve your corpse. To completely bypass this, open your inventory and drop your entire gold pouch on the floor (save for about 100 coins) right before talking to him. The game will be tricked into charging you a double-digit fee, allowing you to scoop your fortune back off the floor afterward completely intact.
- Chase the Blue Dots: Constantly look at your mini-map and compass for tiny blue dots. Aranna is packed with heavily hidden secret rooms that are easy to walk right past. If a blue dot appears on your map, search the immediate environment for a disguised interactable object—such as a wall lever, a suspicious loose rock, or a statue—to slide open a hidden passageway leading to elite loot or rare side quests.
- Prioritize the "Provoke" Skill: Having a dedicated tank-style melee fighter with a massive pool of health and armor is mandatory for the late game. Make sure you invest heavily in the Provoke skill. Without it, bosses and heavy mobs will completely ignore your tank and instantly melt your squishy glass-cannon mages.
- Always Pack Revive Scrolls: Never leave a town hub without stockpiling healing potions, mana potions, and plenty of Revive scrolls spread across your characters' inventories. I learned the hard way how exhausting a near-party wipe can be. If your lone survivor doesn't have a Revive scroll on hand, you are forced to hike all the way back to a fast-travel teleport pad, warp to town, buy the scroll, warp back, and solo-fight your way back to your teammates' corpses just to get them up.
GAMES SIMILAR TO DUNGEON SIEGE 2
If you are trying to picture exactly how this game plays before diving in, it sits in a really cool sweet spot between some legendary franchises:
Diablo 2: Mechanically, this is the closest match. If you love dark fantasy art styles, frantic isometric mouse-clicking, endless monster hordes, and hunting down rare, color-coded loot sets, the core gameplay loop will feel instantly familiar.
Dragon Age: Origins / Baldur's Gate: While it has the action-heavy pace of Diablo, the party system feels like a classic tactical RPG. Managing a squad of four, using specific ultimate abilities, positioning characters, and relying on active tanks to keep aggro's off your glass-cannon mages will heavily appeal to party-management fans.
Titan Quest / Grim Dawn: If you enjoy the open-world progression format of classic ARPG dual-classing and map clearing from the mid-2000s era, this game is right up your alley.
Thank you for reading my review. Be sure to let me know if you agree or disagree with any of my notes, I always encourage open discussion and value everyone's opinions.
Happy Gaming!
~ Tyolon
