Smash Diablo together with your typical tower defense game and – well, there’s probably multiple results out there by now with the proliferation of the genre – but in this case you get Dungeon Defenders, a game that has hooked Android and iPhone gamers for nearly a year until finally making its big screen debut after some delays. The wait has been mostly worth it for those looking for this kind of thing on a console instead of PC for once, though it hits a few snags along the way.
The background for the game is pretty simple. A long time ago in a typical fantasy land far away, some evil forces unleashed hell until a band of four conveniently distinguished heroes of different classes locked them away into these Eternia Crystals. Time passes and apparently these heroes have to head elsewhere so they leave their kids (the squire, the apprentice, the monk, and the huntress) with the problem. Well apparently Eternia doesn’t mean forever as now a whole new host of baddies have come to crack the crystals open, so it’s up to these untrained heirs to build up the defenses and their XP to stop hell from breaking loose.
As you can certainly guess by now, each of the kids has their own abilities and specialties related to their class. The squire is a melee beast who can build walls to block off mobs as well as towers capable of massive damage. The apprentice is a mage type mostly suited to ranged spells and towers capable of specific elemental damage, handy against later legions of foes that are specifically typed. The monk can do a mix of ranged and melee attacks, and instead of towers produces auras or circles of influence that can damage or slow down mobs, or buff allies. Finally the huntress is ranged specialist with the capability of setting traps for foes.
This all sounds well and good until you realize that you have to level up quite a bit to unlock the abilities that really confer the biggest advantage of what your class is about. For instance, in the tutorial the game informed me that mana bombs would be a key ability of my apprentice. Too bad you can’t unlock that until level 20! And all of those elemental towers require leveling, too, so there’s a bit of grinding to do before you can handle the harder levels. Compounding issues is the fact that leveling isn’t done evenly in groups. Those who get the kills get the XP, so kill stealing becomes an issue, and if you’re ranged class then good luck as the squire kicks all sorts of butt before your towers and spells really get a chance. The same goes for loot as it is first come first serve, no rolls, though fortunately is easy to tell whether something is an upgrade or something you can even use in the first place. None of this really breaks the game, but it can make things take a little longer or more frustrating to progress through, just a fair warning.
Levels start off pretty basic with obvious choke points and then build up into confrontations where you must fend off hordes coming from all directions and the occasional boss. You must defeat a handful of waves before calling it a victory. Of course before each wave there is a build period where not only can you place and repair defenses, you can also take care of looting and leveling up your character. Depending on your settings you can have a set time or leave it up to a ready check at the Eternia Crystal before beginning the action. Unfortunately in the console version at least, the camera really hampers your planning as none of the pre-sets zoom out anywhere near enough to actually see much further than your immediate vicinity. Holding the left shoulder button for a map helps give you the big picture as well as how many enemies are coming from each entrance, but flipping between that and the main view gets confusing as you have to concentrate to figure out which way you’re facing on the map. It would have been better if the map rotated to match your orientation, in my opinion, or at least some sort of mini map so you don’t have to constantly flip it on and off.
There’s a lot of ways to customize your character as you spend talent points on either your hero’s direct abilities or the abilities of their towers or defenses. On top of that, you can spend mana to unlock and upgrade your equipment to increase these skills even further. A lot of thought can put into these sort of decisions and there doesn’t appear to be a cookie cutter way to go about it like in many games. You can play to your style and that is a plus. Unfortunately you can’t really show off your style other than the weapon you hold. Everyone looks the same no matter what armor they wear. The only thing you can change is your color.
The graphics in Dungeon Defenders kind of blend the aesthetics of WoW with some of the designs of the 8-bit or 16-bit Final Fantasy. The apprentice looks a bit like the 8-bit black mage, the huntress somewhat like a night elf. The environments make a lot of use of colored lighting and matches the character art well. On the other hand the enemies are mostly pretty generic, most of whom get lost in the shuffle when they amass upon your towers except for the huge orcs and bosses. The game’s sound track is the typical fantasy fare, with a bit of a silliness in the kids celebrations at the end of each round. Everything fits together and Trendy Entertainment have certainly built their own little universe here, so no complaints here.
In the end, Dungeon Defenders is the type of game that is really for the kind of person looking for it in the first place. While it has a friendly outward appearance and is easy to get into, it can be difficult to get around some of its pitfalls in the control scheme and camera (at least on consoles), as well as the loot and experience rules. None of this would really detract from the tower defense veteran, and all of the key elements are executed well. If you’ve got a dependable group of friends to play this with, it should be a blast. If you’re going at it alone, not so much, though you may have some luck with random groups.
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