The PSP has no shortage of dungeon crawlers already, but a game that's based on the latest Dungeons & Dragons ruleset - surely that's got to be a good thing?

Dungeons & Dragons Tactics start promisingly enough. The title screen is dark and moody, the music stirring and melodic, the choices menu comprehensively long. In fact, this is the first real hint about how deep this game is. On the main menu screen there are no less than eight options, including several ways to start playing. Depending on your preference for instant action, you might be tempted to hit the 'Quickstart' button, which takes you straight into the game with a pre-generated party of characters, who are pretty well balanced. But if you're a hardcore D&D fan - and this game does seem to be targeting the more hardcore fans - you will probably choose to generate your own characters.

Each party has one main character - the 'hero' - who is the centre of the story, such as it is. You can, if you like, simply generate your hero manually and then choose the other characters in your party from a predefined selection, or you can create every single character yourself. This will, however, take some time. To create a character you have to make the following choices. First up, the gender and race. Gender, unsurprisingly, is a simple male/female choice and other than graphically there is no difference between the sexes. Then you have a choice of seven races to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, dwarves can see in the dark, halflings can move quietly, elves are resistant to certain kinds of magic and so on. Once you've chosen a gender and a race, you have to pick your class. There are thirteen to select from and, once again, each class has its own strengths and weaknesses. Your choices don't end here, either; after choosing a class you have to allocate individual points to your six different statistics and then you must choose your alignment from the five available, which affects the way your character interacts with others and the world around them.

So far, so good - but now you must select your skills too! There are twenty-five skills available, ranging from autohypnosis, which gives your magical and poison resistances a big boost, to escape artistry, which does what it says on the tin. The skills aren't simply on/off, either, as you can give each of your selections a boost from the pool of points you have at your disposal. You might be thinking that there can't possibly be anything else to do - but you'd be wrong! Next, there are feats to select. This works in a similar way to the skills selection and the list of possible feats to choose from is impressively long - forty-two in fact. Finally, you select your character's portrait, head type (used on the in-game graphic) and name. Then you're done. Only, of course, you're not - you're actually only just getting started.

If you generate your characters by hand then you'll be aware very quickly of just how deep this game is. You'll also learn just how well most of this complexity is implemented; every statistic, every skill, every feat, every little thing has a comprehensive help text attached, which makes things a lot easier to understand. This help system carries on in the main game; every menu item has help that can be accessed by pressing the triangle button. As well as this help, every option screen in the character creation system has an 'auto assign' button that means you can manually do the bits you want and leave the rest up to the very competent AI.

There are some problems though. Died-in-the-wool D&D fans are probably going to struggle with the system, because by all accounts it has been stripped down a little to fit onto the UMD. I personally haven't played D&D for a long time - I was always more of a Warhammer fan myself - and for me the experience was probably a little too complex. It's a shame that Atari don't seem to have accurately targeted either the beginners or the die-hards, but rather somewhere in the middle. Beginners will have to work hard to get the most out of this and real fans will have to allow for the game's shortcomings in implementing the comprehensive ruleset.

Real role playing takes hours. There are all the times when you have to scrutinise the rulebooks to see whether the Orc really has killed the Human. There's the rolling of dice and the making marks on bits of paper. Depending on what you're playing, you maybe even have to move little lead figures around on a board. Computer game versions should be a little faster moving, perhaps - particularly games that are on a handheld system like the PSP. But this is the main problem with D&D Tactics; it moves slower than a tortoise having a kip. Every individual character in your party moves on a turn-by-turn basis (even when outside of battle). This has several effects. Firstly, progress through dungeons is erratic; each character can move a certain number of squares and some can go a lot further than others, so it's easy to get split up if you're not careful. Moreover, the rules of encumbrance are difficult to understand; sometimes a character starts to move really, really slowly no matter - it seems - what you drop to make their load lighter. Another side effect of the turn-based system is that if you have one character in place to perform an action - maybe opening a chest or a door - but they've reached the end of their turn, you have to cycle through all of the characters in your party to get back to the first one. Sure, you can skip each character's go, but you have to manually do this from the menu system every time. Painstakingly, unnecessarily slowly.

The action doesn't even speed up during combat, which is nowhere near as much fun as it should be. If you've come here expecting another Dungeon Siege or Untold Legends then you've come to the wrong place. I'm a big fan of turn-based combat, but this game just gets it so wrong. It's probably the D&D ruleset, but the fact that the statistics are hidden away by the game engine makes things difficult. There will be times when you have three or four characters surrounding an enemy on open terrain, yet none of them seems able to hit their opponent. Sometimes a fight can go on for ten to fifteen minutes, most of which is spent selecting 'attack' and then watching the 'miss' animation appear. There probably are ways to make the combat easier, but they aren't made clear by the arcane menu system.

Everything is controlled from the menus, which would be fine if they made sense. Unfortunately, for large amounts of the time, they don't. Often the game is actually counter-intuitive. For example, when I first levelled up a couple of characters, I was aware that they were ready because the experience bar was flashing on the screen and when I viewed their stats panel I was told that they could level up. However, to actually do this I had to find the command buried in the menu system, which is unconnected to the character stats sheet. And I had to access this command while actually adventuring - it is not available when in the overview of the game world, which you get between missions.

One of the big attractions of games like D&D has always been the social aspect. Getting together with a few mates, having a bit of a drink maybe, eating pizza. Spending an evening messing around. So it would seem natural that a game like this would have a strong multiplayer aspect - and in some ways it has. If you're together with another three PSP-toting mates, who all own copies of the game, you can play a variety of games. These range from the obligatory deathmatch to dragon-killing, dungeon-bashing cooperative modes. But the problem should be obvious, really; if you're going to spend an evening with three mates playing D&D, why not just... play D&D? Why play a game on the PSP that, in fairness, probably isn't as good as the 'real thing'?

Hang on, though, I can hear you thinking. Multiplayer online must be good, surely? Well, yes, I'd imagine that it would be really good. It would probably make this little title jump from the six I've awarded it to the seven that I thought about. The only problem is that there is no online mode. It seems a shame and I can't understand why there isn't one - after all a turn-based game is hardly going to suffer from lag, is it? But, unfortunately, we'll never know.

The graphics are okay - not great, but not bad either. Things do have a tendency to be a little dark and the camera is pretty awkward to control, but these issues are forgivable in a turn-based game. Sometimes the controls are tricky though, which is less easy to cope with. Whenever you move a character, a grid of available squares appears around them. You use the D-pad to map a path to your destination but problems arise when you have the camera at a funny angle because you're trying to see what's going on around you - the grid can be displayed diagonally on the screen and the D-pad then becomes frustratingly difficult to use. Often you have to move the camera around to get the exact position so you can select the square you want to move to.

The sound is probably a little better than the graphics, but only marginally. The music swells and rolls, but it all sounds the same and the sound effects in combat are a bit hit and miss. For example, when an arrow hits an enemy's wooden shield in the animation, you might expect a satisfying thud of a sound. What you get, though, is 'generic arrow sound number 4', which sounds more like two metal forks hitting each other.

There are some real problems with Dungeons & Dragons Tactics. Its presentation is hardly pushing the PSP and the turn-based nature of the gameplay makes everything painstakingly slow. However, underneath it all there is a long and fairly rewarding game. More than that, this little UMD contains pretty much the entire D&D ruleset, which is a feat of engineering in its own right. But feats of engineering do not always make the best games and although Tactics isn't really that bad, it could have been a whole lot better.

Reviewed by Dom Turner for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).