Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance

If all you want to do is hack and slash some monsters with friends and earn better weapons and gear, this is a pretty good choice for dozens of hours of fun. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is perfectly playable as a single-player game -- you can adjust difficulty so that you don't encounter any serious roadblocks -- but it's a lot more entertaining played with friends with whom you can joke around while taking on waves of baddies. Combat and movement are a little stiff compared to many bigger-budget action games, but that shouldn't keep most players from having a blast carving their way through hordes of monsters or feeling a little spike of dopamine whenever one happens to drop a legendary or epic (they're color-coded so it's easy to tell) piece of loot. And while the idea of playing and replaying chapters just to level up and earn better gear might seem tedious, it will likely take quite a while for a sense of repetition to set in, since there are dozens of acts -- each of which take around half an hour -- spread across multiple campaigns. Basically, there's no shortage of missions to choose from.

There's a little more to it than just monster beatdowns, though. It's surprisingly pretty for a budget-priced game, with great character designs and loads of cool lighting effects. And die-hard D&D fans will dig all the bits of lore that you can find in tomes and tablets scattered around the environments, which you can read outside the heat of battle, as well as the game's authentic sense of humor, expressed most notably by monsters muttering among themselves. Still, the main reason to play a game like this is to battle trolls and ogres with your pals and grind for loot. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is action-packed, very easy to pick up, and all the more fun if you have a friend or three who can join you.