The to-hit bonus for ported games being crap has to be something like +4, with a greatly extended critical range. So why should Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony even be of interest? Because new content based on existing franchises has worked well on the PSP -as the Grand Theft Auto and Syphon Filter games have shown us. Also, games like the two Untold Legends titles have demonstrated that an action RPG is a near-perfect fit for the PSP hardware and controls. What those games lacked was a compelling reason to play - they featured generic characters, stories and combat, even by action RPG standards. Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony will not change any opinions you might have about deep stories in action RPGs, but it is a fun game that is the best handheld action RPG yet and will keep you going for many hours - if you can get past its limitations and flaws.

The story takes place in the Broken Lands, thereby sharing a common frame of reference with the recent PC expansion Dungeon Siege II: Broken World (not the only commonality - more on that later). You end up stuck in the Broken Lands for reasons that depend on your character. Allistair is searching for his love, a Seeker who has gone looking for a powerful artifact, Mogrim is the last of his kind, yet after the Cataclysm he feels drawn to the north and Serin sees a need to strike back at the forces of evil, as all of her people were struck 'blind' during the Cataclysm. You board a boat together, which then crashes on the shores of the Savage Forest - and your adventure begins. All of this foreshadowing is done in a nice 'graphic novel' style that is very effective and much more interesting than the typical scaled-down CGI.

What you are really getting is a motivation more than a story - the world was broken in the Cataclysm and there is much evil trying to fill the void of power left in its wake. You are given a solid character that has a purpose in this land - or at least thinks they do. You travel from town to town, meeting leaders who need you to help them out in various ways - beating back hordes or evil, finding lost settlers, picking up dry-cleaning and so on. After taking care of one area you are given a bigger chunk of information about the 'larger story', which directs you on to the next area … and to the next quest givers. It is just enough to keep you engaged while ensuring you aren't ever lost by the pick-up-and-play nature of the PSP, but it is a fairly thin story - even compared to the PC Dungeon Siege games. The layout of the world is significantly different here though - rather than a continuous world that you unfold a bit at a time, you enter areas such as dungeons, then exit to the world map, where you run around from area to area.

Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony allows you to choose from not one, not two, but THREE completely predefined and configured characters - that's right, you're the male fighter, male battle-mage or female rogue. I know - knock you over with a feather, right?! Seriously though, this isn't as bad as it sounds - each character actually has their own back story and motivation for venturing into the broken lands. Not only that but each of the characters has a very individual combat style and set of companions that make fighting the same areas feel different for each one. Mogrim is a huge warrior with very powerful melee attacks, Allistair is a battlemage who can use melee weapons as well as powerful magic and Serin is a dual-wielding rogue with some great speed attacks.

Aside from specialized skills and attacks, each player gets a companion - instead of recruiting party members, Throne of Agony features companions that you can summon called 'followers'. You select one after choosing a character - each character gets to choose from two, typically one focusing on melee and the other on ranged attacks and support. As you progress through the game you will meet several others, so by the end you can have up to ten available followers. Simply summon one and it will appear at your side, while your current follower returns to its Pokeball or wherever it came from.

Character progression is a major aspect in most RPGs and it's prominently featured here. The three character types are already very distinct and offer a different gameplay experience, but the ability to tailor your specific character to a great degree allows you to customize this experience. And because it is just you and a follower, the impact feels much greater than in the PC versions of the game. There are more skills than you will ever have skill points for, so you need to actually think and plan on where to spend the points for maximum impact; going for a blanket approach will give you a broad set of low level skills - and a quick trip to an early death. Applying skills too narrowly will certainly find you focused on a single skill type (or element) that is completely ineffective against a certain boss - another recipe for a quick trip to an early death. The game provides an abundance of information here - just check out all of the possible skills and see how the progression changes the skills, then you can start planning.

So I decided to play the Allistair the Battle Mage and assumed that my level-up strategy would focus primarily on staying alive and casting more powerful magic, and secondarily on increasing my melee attacks. Based on that I chose the Stone Golem follower over the Lap Dragon - I was looking forward to watching the Golem lumber in and take out enemies while I toasted them with fireballs from the sidelines. Unfortunately it didn't really work that way - every enemy focused all of their attacks on me and the Golem had no initiative to attack enemies until I made the first move. On the good side he could take loads of abuse, but on the bad side I ended up providing primary melee attacks as well as magic attacks to initiate melee - he was merely around to knock off some enemy hit points to make my job a bit easier. Needless to say, I dumped him as soon as I could. I found a nice Druid in the middle of Act I, who was very good at casting healing spells when I was at full health and putting herself into harm's way to help me use up some resurrection Ankh's that were over-filling my inventory. I stuck with her for a very long time because she would occasionally be very useful and was a better support system than any of the other followers I found.

Followers accumulate experience as your do - even if they are not active, but in that case they level up more slowly. However, when they level up you cannot simply allocate their points - their attributes points are automatically allocated and you need to go to a scholar in town and pay to allocate their skills. As skills increase in level they increase in cost - but this isn't much of a problem, since you will have plenty of extra gold to spend. The biggest hassle is taking time to go to town to upgrade your followers.

Action RPGs by their very nature are more about a series of missions that end up telling a story rather than a true narrative. This is very much true in Throne of Agony - you have a primary quest-giver who gives you missions as well as helping you unravel bits and pieces of the over-arching story, a little at a time. Unfortunately, most of the time what you will hear is more like "thanks for finishing the quest, here's your loot, blah blah blah, here's another quest." The overall story is thin to the point that I actually got lost between quest givers - it wasn't clear that I was done with one section and that it was time to move on to the next area. This is partially due to the quest structure; you are given quests and occasionally you can choose to accept or reject them, but if you accept then you get a small description in your quest log.

The quest has a number associated with it - that number is the recommended player character level before tacking the quest. For example, I picked up an optional quest early on that was a '28' when Allistair was level 16 - I knew it would be a while before I attempted that one! This quest-leveling is very helpful at helping you keep track of where you should be if you expect to successfully meet a challenge, but it has another effect - you become a slave to the numbers, constantly going back through areas to gain more experience and additional levels. You also tend to get more experience by spending extra time in a dungeon, since enemies respawn slowly over time. If you are in need of significant experience you can spend quite a while grinding out a level in a dungeon before tackling the next quest and by the time you do start the quest you might not remember what you're doing anymore.

One of the great things in the Dungeon Siege games is the teleportation system. After exploring an area you can find and activate a teleporter, which allows you to quickly return to a town to sell off some booty or buy some potions before proceeding. What if I told you that in this game, getting from a dungeon entry to a teleporter not fifty feel away and teleporting to a city and walking to the vendor right beside the teleporter and then returning takes about five minutes - and that more than four of those minutes are spent watching 'now loading' screens? Load times are a typical bane of the PSP fan's existence, but these are particularly heinous because they don't seem bad at first. Thirty seconds here, thirty seconds there, fifteen seconds to wake up from sleep mode, ten seconds to load the main menu (yes there is a loading screen for the menu) - none of these times are very long, but they start to stack up and become annoying.

This is exacerbated by other decisions and problems - the inventory system being chief among them. Your slots are very limited and they include items you have equipped. So if you can carry 35 things and have a total of 13 items equipped, including weapons armor and other stuff, then you only have around 20 slots remaining. Health and mana potions stack in inventory (only five per stack though) but town portal scrolls and Ankhs don't. So if you are going into a dangerous dungeon you can expect to have at least a dozen slots taken up by potions, scrolls and Ankhs. This forces you into a position of either constantly returning to town to sell stuff off or just skipping the loot. It was at this point I had my single positive memory of the Untold Legends game - in the first one you could learn a spell that would turn items to gold (at a lousy exchange rate, but still). I would have loved that option here.

One thing is certain about this type of game - it is the kind of experience people love to share. The best way to share this type of game is using online co-op multiplayer - something that Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony doesn't support. I have too few friends with PSPs and even less time to play games in the same room with them, so all I got was a single half hour session of co-op. This was just enough to tell me how excellent it would be exploring these dungeons with an intelligent friend at my side, rather than a 'follower'. It also made it more frustrating every time I was struggling against a pack of foes and found my stone golem chatting up a rock on the sidelines.

I had a load of fun playing Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony, but I was struck at every turn by how much better it could have been. There are other minor issues - the inventory system, repetitive combat and lack of intelligent allies and enemies are the most notable - that plague the game, taking what is at times a truly excellent experience and making the end product frustratingly average. It is frustrating because it is clear while playing that this game could have been so much better with a few tweaks to the gameplay and some significant load-time optimization. If you can overlook all that though, there's a great action RPG adventure here that deserves your attention.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).