Parent's Guide: Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale is a co-operative, hack and slash role-playing game that's been designed to be played with two or more people. After choosing a character from a list of pre-made choices, your child will wander around a dark, gloomy world, completing quests for characters, who'll mostly ask them to do slight variations on the same thing - go here, fetch this, and bring it back.

The main chunk of the gameplay in Daggerdale revolves around defending yourself against attack. As you move from A to B for each quest, your child will find themselves under a pretty constant stream of attack, which may prove frustrating. It's a case of mashing buttons until you've eventually managed to defeat all the bad guys, and moving onto your quest.

There's a fair amount of reading involved here, and as there's little voice acting, most of the quests you're given to complete are delivered by text, so a strong reading ability is essential. More worrying is the incredibly poor interface, which makes it almost impossible tell where you're meant to be going next, and is sure to make things awkward for younger players.

There's not too much wrong with Daggerdale. There's no swearing, and no sexual content either - the only real issue here is violence. Enemies give off small clouds of dark red when hit, but it's nothing that's over gratuitous, like decapitations, or the like. In terms of violence, this is very mild.

Although it's been designed to be played co-operatively, Dungeons & Dragons Daggerdale is somewhat disappointing, as, while it allows for four players to play together online, you can only have two players locally, on the same console. That said, the game is a lot more fun when played co-operatively, and suddenly becomes a lot easier, thanks to the ability to revive your partner when they get knocked out - meaning you don't have to restart the mission from the beginning. In a nice touch, each character has their own save game, too, meaning you'll both earn achievements.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360