Earlier today, during a meeting with Atari, we had an opportunity to get our hands on an alpha version of Dungeons & Dragons Tactics for the PlayStation Portable. Currently scheduled for release in February, the turn-based strategy game adheres quite strictly to the D&D 3.5 rule set but is most definitely being developed with newcomers as well as hardcore D&D fans in mind. During the hour or so that we were able to spend with the game on this occasion, we took a good look at the character-generation system (there are no drow or half-dragons, sorry) and then put our new character and his party to work in a couple of early missions.

　　There are seven different races available when you create a new character in Dungeons & Dragons Tactics, including humans, dwarves, gnomes, elves, half-elves, halflings, and half-orcs. After opting for one of those and settling on your gender, you'll be able to choose from no fewer than 13 different classes for your new character, which include barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, psion, psychic warrior, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, and wizard. Depending on your class choice, you'll be able to choose from up to nine different alignments for your character, which include good, neutral, and evil variants of lawful, neutral, and chaotic.

　　With all of that taken care of, your next task will be to assign points to your character's various attributes, skills, and feats. It's right about here that D&D newcomers could potentially start to feel out of their depth, so although the whole process is about as user-friendly as possible, Kuju has also included options to have your points assigned automatically--taking into account your race and class choices. The last thing you'll need to do before setting out on your first quest (there will be more than 40 in total) is to choose the portrait that will represent your character in cutscenes and party-selection screens and, completely independent of that, determine the look of his or her 3D character model by choosing from a handful of different head and body options. The 3D models for party members and their enemies are nicely detailed, particularly given that you're unlikely to see them up close very often during the normal course of play.

　　Everything about Dungeons & Dragons Tactics is looking great right now, in fact, and the environments that you'll be questing in are certainly worthy of a mention. We saw two very different environments during our meeting: an outdoor battlefield at Estmanndal (the game's first level) and a series of underground caves and tunnels. The battlefield counted wide-open spaces with trees, walls, and barricades to provide cover among its features, and all of them looked great and cast realistic shadows. Our goal on that particular mission was to stop an enemy who was carrying a flag from escaping, and after checking out our party's skills, it quickly became obvious that there were several ways for us to go about achieving that goal. To be perfectly honest, a lot of the skill and spell names didn't mean an awful lot to us when we saw them appearing in the easy-to-navigate action menus, but with a quick press of the triangle button, we were able to call up brief explanations of each of them--a good example of Kuju going the extra mile to make the game as accessible as possible without bogging down experienced players with details that they already know.

　　Torches are useful in caves, but carrying one might mean leaving your shield or another useful item behind.

　　The underground caves and tunnels had a very different feel about them, not only because we had to concern ourselves with light spells and torches, but also because the gameplay involved a lot more exploration--which was invariably rewarded with treasure chests full of loot. The enemies that our party of level-one characters came up against while underground were skeletons and zombies mostly, so it was fortunate that the party we'd assembled to go into the level included a cleric. You'll get to choose different members (either premade or created from scratch) for your party before every quest, and while you'll never know exactly what kind of enemies to expect, taking the time to read through the prequest conversations between characters and such will often afford you a few hints.

　　Our progress through each of the areas that we saw today was slow, not only because we were experimenting with different characters that we knew very little about, but also because--in the interests of grabbing as much loot as possible--most of our characters became encumbered and weren't able to move as quickly as normal. As a result, we didn't get to see nearly as much of Dungeons & Dragons Tactics as we'd have liked. We look forward to bringing you a more detailed preview of the game a little closer to its release, and in the meantime, be sure to check out our previous coverage for more information.