I’ve been playing the Beta build of Soldak Entertainments’s old school styled dungeon crawling rpg Din’s Curse. A big part of Din’s Curse is the fact that every player will experience something different with the randomly generated towns, NPC’s, quests and dungeons. The only character that you’ll see every time is Din, The Champion of The Gods, who will give you your main quests. Din has cursed your character to a second life, since you wasted your first one causing trouble for others. Your curse is to help save towns from monsters and evil forces.

I created six different characters while playing and each town has been drastically different. The buildings, city layout, NPC’s, quests, and dungeons were very different and made each playthrough as fun and exciting as the first. The town has townspeople and vendors that can change based on your actions and reputation. There are certain quests you will recieve that are urgent and you will need to complete quickly or else you fail them, get negative reputation, and there will be negative consequences either in town or the dungeons. Vendors will sometimes wander through town temporarily offering items you can’t get from normal vendors.

This game boasts a possible 141 possible class combinations, with 6 main classes that have 3 skill trees each and the option to make a hybrid class that can have any 2 of the 18 skill trees. The skill trees gives each class different ways in which it can be played, for example; the Priest class has the Paladin tree which gives your priest melee abilities and the ability to wear chainmail, Healer which gives you healing and buff spells and Shaman which is like a caster. One thing I really appreciate is the ability to respec for a fee because I hate being stuck in RPG’s with the choices I made with skills before I knew how some of them worked.

An important part to any dungeon crawler is the loot and Din’s Curse has it in spades. When you find rare items you need to identify them to find out what the stats are and equip them. They have the standard color coded item rarity system with uncommon, rare and epic armor and weapons. On top of that they have very rare ego items which can be on any rarity item that gives a substantial stat boost.

Each dungeon, just like the towns, are also all different. In these dungeons you will have to battle many different monsters, who could also be fighting each other, while dodging traps, avoiding cave-ins, saving NPC’s and loot hunting. An example was when I found an NPC and helped him fight off multiple monsters. After saving him I accidently set off a trap next to him and he died, making me fail the quest and lose reputation.

Din’s Curse offers online multiplayer co-op along with a single-player campaign. With the combination of co-op, unique towns and massive class possibilities, Din’s Curse should supply many hours of fun and replayability. It is currently available for preorder at Soldak Entertainment’s website.  It is expected to be released Q1 2010 for Windows PC and Mac.