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Nelson Schneider's Video Game Reviews (474)

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Assassin's Creed IV: Bl... 2.5/5
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Dungeon Defenders   PlayStation Network 

Two Bland Tastes That… Taste Good Together?    3.5/5 stars

“Dungeon Defenders” is the first game produced by the Florida-based indie developer, Trendy Entertainment, combining two of the hottest sub-genres in repetition-centric gameplay: Tower Defense and Hack ‘n Slash. While it is common for the big publishers to throw their games onto any and every platform that will run them, most indie developers stick with the PC, with a port to the ‘I Can’t Believe it’s Not a PC’ Xbox 360. In Trendy’s case, they’ve ported their inaugural effort, which was originally developed for PC, to both PS3 and Xbox 360, with indications of yet another port to the PlayStation Vita, and a modified version for iOS and Android devices. Is it possible for an indie developer to maintain so many different versions of a single game? Is it possible that two relatively bland sub-genres can be combined into something amazing?

Presentation
“Dungeon Defenders” is an example of the type of creativity that can result from using pre-packaged tools and not worrying about building something from scratch, as it is built entirely with the Unreal SDK with graphics powered by the Unreal Engine. While many Unreal Engine games look samey and uninteresting with disturbing characters straight out of the Uncanny Valley, “Dungeon Defenders” shows off the flexibility of the Engine with its cartoony characters, bright colors, and whimsical environments. This flexibility does have some limits, though, as the in-game character models have a few slight differences from the character concept art that appears in the still-frame cutscenes; specifically, the fact that the Squire’s face isn’t merged with his helmet.

The music and sound effects are unspectacular, but they get the job done. The soundtrack in “Dungeon Defenders” is tiny, with the same three tracks used repeatedly for most parts of the game. There is little voiceacting, but what there is works well and adds to the quirky humor presented by the rest of the game.

Where “Dungeon Defenders” suffers its greatest failings, however, is in technical difficulties. The game is quite buggy, with numerous balance issues and minor quirks that make the game impossible to win at higher difficulties, such as the fact that defenses and pets will never fire more than one shot per second. While the PC version has received multiple patches to correct these issues and several interesting add-ons via DLC, the console versions have received only one patch and one piece of DLC… which only added more bugs to the pile, including one that can delete every character’s equipment. This is a case of a small indie developer overreaching and trying to cover more ground than their manpower can handle. While releasing on consoles is generally a good idea for increasing awareness (I would never have heard of this game, nor played it had it not been released on PS3), providing a buggy, half-baked experience to the expanded platforms turns positive exposure into a negative.

Story
“Dungeon Defenders” is pretty light on the story, as are most games in its combination of genres. It seems that ancient, terrible evils were defeated by a group of four heroes and sealed away in Eternia Crystals. Years later, these four heroes have children who are essentially clones of themselves. As heroes are prone to do, they are called away to a neighboring kingdom to fight in a crusade, leaving their kids behind.

Kids being kids, they manage to horse around a knock over an Eternia Crystal shard, which summons countless hordes of monsters who seek to beat down the doors of the dungeons in which the crystals are kept, break the crystals, and free their ancient masters. The young hero protégés must leap into action and halt the monster invasion, lest their parents be upset about returning home to a smoldering crater filled with ancient evils.

Perhaps the best story element in the game is the bartender who runs the item shop that the characters visit between missions. He stands around spouting a huge variety of quips, wisecracks, and jokes in a thick Irish brogue (my favorite is his jab at the Unreal Engine, in which he says, “Brown is realism!”). Aside from him, none of the other characters have much in the way of developed personalities or identities, mainly because there are no other characters to interact with, nor is there much of a running narrative, nor is there a well-developed antagonist or villain. If it weren’t for the personalities of each character’s PLAYER coming through in their actions, they would be completely blank.

Gameplay
“Dungeon Defenders” is a true hybrid game, blending Tower Defense with Hack ‘n Slash RPG-style character upgrades. Tower Defense is a Strategy sub-genre that arose during the current hardware generation and has seen explosive popularity and dozens on releases… on smartphones. While there are a few Tower Defense titles on proper consoles, the sub-genre lends itself to short bursts of hands-off play that make it eminently suitable for touchscreens. Hack ‘n Slash RPGs, however, are the offspring of “Diablo,” featuring button-mashy combat and character development that, at times, seems to focus more on loot acquisition than levels and stats. It turns out that levels and loot were exactly what Tower Defense needed to extend it beyond casual play.

“Dungeon Defenders” features four character classes, each with a specific category of weapon and unique stable of buildable defenses. These characters are the Squire, who hits enemies with melee weapons while building blockades that hinder their progress; the Apprentice, who shoots bolts of magic at enemies while building towers that deal elemental-based damage; the Huntress, who shoots enemies with guns and bows while building traps that can’t be damaged but have a limited number of uses; and the Monk, who can perform both melee and ranged attacks while building auras that can’t be damaged but exist for a limited duration. In addition to normal attacks, each character has 4 special abilities, two the same for everyone and two unique to each. The universal skills are a Self Heal, that restores the character’s health, and a Repair Defense, that restores the health of a nearby defense. The Squire’s unique skills are a Circle Slice and a Blood Rage that increases his strength and speed, the Apprentice’s unique skills are a massive Mana Bomb and an Overcharge Mode that allows him to repair defenses at a rapid pace, the Huntress’ unique skills are an enemy-avoiding Stealth Mode and a Piercing Shot that plows through a column of enemies, while the Monk’s unique skills are a Hero Boost to nearby allies and a Defense Boost to nearby defenses.

Each of the game’s 13 stages is divided into two phases: Build and Combat. During the Build Phase, players must gather some of the game’s universal currency, Mana, from a handful of starting treasure chests. Using this Mana, players must build defenses in order to prevent hordes of enemies, called ‘Creeps,’ from reaching and destroying one or more Eternia Crystals. Each stage has a number of doors that allow Creeps to enter the stage. During the Build Phase, the game displays a list of the enemy types and numbers that will come from each door during the following Combat Phase. By touching the Eternia Crystal (or just waiting too long on the highest difficulty), the Combat Phase begins as Creeps pour out of their doors and march ceaselessly toward the nearest Eternia Crystal. Players are free to run around the map, attacking enemies, using special abilities, and repairing defenses. Once all the Creeps in the wave are dead, the doors slam shut and another Build Phase begins, allowing players to repair, replace, or upgrade defenses in preparation for the next wave of enemies. Each stage has a different number of waves and players commonly start in the middle of these (i.e., starting on wave 5/9 instead of 1/9) for reasons that are still unknown to me. After clearing each stage a ‘Challenge’ in that stage becomes available that adds a set of unique conditions to the regular stage, but also rewards players with a unique weapon upon completion.

The cast of Creeps is fairly small, but features a lot of diversity. There are weak melee goblins, strong melee orcs, dark elf archers who love to take pot shots, dark elf warriors who like to jump on characters’ heads and attack stealthed Huntresses, suicide bombing kobolds, dark elf wizards who summon enormous hordes of defense-trashing skeletons while throwing fireballs and healing their allies, and ogre mini-bosses who can simply push most defenses out of the way and have ridiculous amounts of health. Each type of enemy is best dealt with using specific techniques (dark elf wizards, for example, will just stand in the doorways summoning billions of skeletons if a character doesn’t seek and destroy them), which allows for a lot of different strategies and defensive placements. Creeps also come in a variety of colors, which indicate their overall strength, and sometimes possess random immunities to elemental damage. There are three boss Creeps in all, each of which appears after the final wave in their stage, accompanied by an endless wave of allies.

The four characters are each ranked with a player skill level because, quite frankly, they aren’t particularly well-balanced. It is essential to use the Squire for his blockades and the Apprentice for his towers from the very beginning of the game, while the Huntress and Monk suffer from the fact that their defenses deplete from simple use. In the beginning of the game, when it costs the same amount of resources to build a Squire’s Bouncer Blockade that will clog a path and deal a lot of damage or a Huntress’ Proximity Mine that will explode 3 times, it’s a waste to go with the Mine. The classes do balance themselves out in the mid-to-end-game, but, unless a character is over-leveled, every map requires a mix of character defenses to win. In single player mode, this mix can be accomplished by switching between characters of each class, but these switches can only be performed between waves of enemies. It’s obvious that Trendy’s intention here was to have a multi-player game, since both PC and console versions support local and online co-op. Adding additional players increases the number of Creeps in each wave, but ultimately makes the game easier because the stages are just too big for one person to cover alone. No matter the strategy used, it’s difficult and frustrating to keep an eye on all sides of a huge stage.

Aside from the fact that characters can directly engage the enemies, the Hack ‘n Slash elements of the game take the form of character levels and loot dropped randomly by enemies or obtained from the Build Phase treasure chests. In addition to weapons, characters can equip a helmet, armor, gloves, and boots, as well as obtain a tiny pet creature to fight alongside them. Each piece of loot comes with a variety of stat boosts and attributes that vary wildly and are completely random. Each piece of equipment also has a random number of upgrade levels, allowing players to spend excess Mana, which is stored in an item bank (along with loot grabbed during Build/Combat Phases), to improve the item’s existing attributes. Characters likewise can increase their own attributes by gaining levels, which award up to 5 attribute-increasing skill points each time. One of my biggest issues with “Dungeon Defenders” is the cryptic nature of character and weapon attributes. There is no information in-game about what specific attributes do, nor how much a 1-point increase will actually improve a character/item. As someone who primarily played as a Huntress, I was also annoyed by the large amount of hidden attributes attached to the various Huntress weapons (this doesn’t affect the other classes nearly as much), such as normal attacks that pierce enemies/walls or converting all generic damage into fire damage. I found that I NEEDED to consult the official “Dungeon Defenders” wiki online, but even information directly from the horse’s mouth was incomplete and not very useful. “Dungeon Defenders” is a complex game that, as a digital product, does not include an instruction manual. The game desperately needs more pop-up tooltips to explain its RPG aspects.

Overall
While mildly enjoyable alone, “Dungeon Defenders” really shines as a couch-co-op experience, and was clearly designed with a primary focus on multi-player. The ability to call in assistance from friends and improve characters tempers the otherwise frustrating difficulty presented by most Tower Defense games, while the focus on strategy and defense tempers the excessive repetition and ‘loot treadmilling’ typically presented by Hack ‘n Slash RPGs. “Dungeon Defenders” is truly an example of a game that is greater than the sum of its parts. If Trendy were better able to support a multitude of platforms with patches and DLC, they’d have a real winner here. As it stands, I would recommend the PC version over the console versions. Hopefully Trendy will have enough success with this game that they can hire some more QA testers and release a longer, content-packed sequel with an instruction manual.

Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 3/5 Single player, 4/5 Multi-Player
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5

Update: After playing the PC version of the game, I fully stand by my description of the PS3 version as a sub-par port. The PC version fixes all of the bugs and all of the balance issues, making the game an absolute joy to play, either alone or with co-conspirators. All of the extra DLC does get a bit pricy, but it's pretty good stuff.

PC Version Rating: 4.5/5

 

 


Recent Comments
Comment On Review

Jonzor

Jonzor- wrote on 02/04/12 at 12:44 AM CT

 

Still playing this one strong on Wednesday nights with a Squire, Monk, and Huntress. Steam says I've currently logged 108 hours in the game, and we've done hardly any DLC or Challenges, so that number is going to go up a LOT, I'm sure. Oh, and my level 60 Huntress is absolutely MAULING goblins with her new minigun.

I love this game. It's buggy as crap, but I can't stop playing it. It's a bummer the consoles aren't getting nearly as much love as the PC version, 'cause this game could go on for ever if the developers choose.

 
 
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