Publisher: Trendy Entertainment
Price: $14.99/£10.49
Genre: Tower Defence with 3rd Person Action
Fullscreen Support |
Mouse Support |
File Size |
Launch Date |
Required Specifications |
Yes |
Mouse with Right Button Required |
4.66GB——- |
6th September 2012 |
OS: OS X version Snow Leopard 10.6.6, or later.
|
Rating
Pros: Original take on Tower Defence, crisp, cell-chaded graphics, online and co-op modes.
Cons: Online can be unbalanced, lack of trust-building, restricting.
Review
Dungeon Defenders combines third-person shooting and tower defence beautifully. Literally and figuratively. The polished Unreal-powered visuals and the fluid dynamics between placing and upgrading towers to slicing through the horde yourself make Dungeon Defenders one shiny gem. What’s more, the split-screen co-operative and online multiplayer options make it a great community game to enjoy with friends and strangers.
Tower defences are a touchy subject for all experienced gamers, simply because there are so many that offer almost the same gameplay. Thankfully Dungeon Defenders joins the ranks of Anomaly Warzone Earth by expanding on the genre, and creating an experience totally new and original.
Once you have chosen a class, you are thrown into a 3D environment with paths and an end target; one or more Eternal Crystals. You need to place towers and defences to keep the away enemy advance comprising of orcs, ogres and other obscenities. It’s all sounding very tower-defence at the moment, but once you enter the Combat Stage, you’re character can join the fight on the front line. You can fight with your sword, bow and arrow or magical staff (depending on your class), or take more of a supporting role, repairing towers and upgrading new ones on the fly.
To take things a step further, you can get others to help in the defending. Online and split-screen co-op is included, and it’s great feeling someone is watching your back with their own defences.
That being said, the more people you have by your side, the more you have to fight over the mana required to build your own towers. Mana is dropped by enemies, and collected through chests scattered around the level at the building stage.
What games like Left for Dead and Portal 2 do so well in their co-operative campaigns is promote a connection between online companions. Forcing them to help each other out, get each other out of a bad situation, solve puzzles together, and soon enough, you have a very shaky form of trust between two people who have never met before. Dungeon Defenders has the co-operative foundations for this kind of trust-building, but the mechanics of the game just don’t get people to interact as well. Once a wave is over, it is a mad dash for all of the mana drops and chests for points to build more towers. Leave it too late, and you’ll probably be left with nothing. You do have the option to heal one another’s towers, but there is no bonus for doing so. It’s a missed trick that could have made co-operative play much more fluid and rewarding.
Your character levels up and gets progressively stronger. You earn money to buy better equipment and pets which help in attacking enemies around you. And you also pick up weapons from enemies. It’s a good system to measure progression, but it can mean that you’re left in a co-op match with some level 40 players on an extreme difficulty, meaning your contribution is very minimal. It’s not clear whether the game automatically tries to find you a game with similar ranked players, but even if it did, there aren’t enough online games going on to match the right people together.
Dungeon Defenders is powered by the Unreal engine, and it shows. The cell-shaded aesthetic works ridiculously well in this context, and each new themed environment is breathtaking. Performance gets understandably slack whilst in the heat of battle, but I was able to fix any problems by lowering the graphical settings. Make sure you check the system requirements before purchasing. Loading screens still slow up the game a lot though.
Dungeon Defenders does include some in-app purchases, but none of it is unreasonable and offer extra content not required to fully enjoy the game as it is. Some extra characters with special abilities and themed maps are available from $1.99/£1.49 to $4.99/£2.99. out of the box you get 4 characters (out of 12), 14 fully realised maps (out of 22) and 15 challenges (out of 25). There is a ton of content here, without paying anything more than the initial asking price. However, if you really enjoy the game, then you might be tempted to splash out on more content.
Dungeon Defenders shows that once again, an original idea can come from a very over-saturated genre. It didn’t get everything right, but it’s an excellent offering with solid graphics and implementation.
Trailer
