A tower defence game with RPG elements? Sign me up!
Playing the Game
Dungeon defender is a tower-defence game with action-rpg elements. The objective of the game is to defend a crystal from waves of evil creatures who are trying to destroy the crystal to unleash an ancient evil. To defend the crystal, you choose one of the four heroes who summon auras (buffs allies and debuffs enemies), barricades, towers and traps, and can also attack enemies with their weaponry.
There are two phases during a level, a building phase and a combat phase. As such the building stage is where you summon defences, and to be able to summon defences your hero requires mana. You acquire mana through defeating enemies and collecting them from chests. Also in this phase, if you have created other heroes you can switch them for others. In the combat phase, waves of creatures come streaming from different entrances and you need to destroy those creatures. Those creatures and chests sometimes drop weapons and armour that you can equip to improve your stats to assist in higher difficulties and harder levels. There are also player shops where you can sell your own goods or buy them with mana. To get more mana you sell drops from the combat phase.
Traps, Traps, Traps and more Traps. I think I need more Traps.
Game Analysis
What Worked
- Swapping Heroes – This is where swapping heroes work. You can alter your strategy accordingly of what you need in multiplayer or single player. Need more DPS, switch to your DPS-specced hero, need more auras switch to monk, need more tanky buildings switch to squire, need more range towers switch to your apprentice and need more traps switch to your huntress.
- Square 1 – In other tower defences, when you die or fail a stage, you start back at the start, all that time and effort gone down the drain. Yes you can learn from these mistakes, but when you’re in your 60th minute the sheer frustration when the thing you’re supposed to protect, goes down in flames. In Dungeon Defenders, the waves are smaller and you also get to keep weapons, armour and experience points even if you do die. You can also upgrade your weaponry and armour to make them stronger. So, you can improve gradually through the waves and it gives people a sense that they can learn from their mistakes and to adapt and evolve their strategies.
- User Shops – This makes it easier to gear up your heroes and your alternate heroes. It also gives the opportunity to discuss strategy and get to know your community. Though these open up to paypal shops (buy mana for money or gear) which are always tempting to spend the cash, but it would kill the challenge of the game.
What Didn’t Worked
- Catch 22 – The idea of this game is to get more powerful gear so you can do higher stages and difficulties. However, the only way to get more powerful gear is to do stages and difficulties that may be well beyond your means. Even with the user shop, greater mana drops at the higher difficulties so unless you adore farming, it is going to take a long time to become decked out.
- Survival Mode – Survival mode was an interesting concept in this game. With each passing wave, the enemies became more numerous and they get a little bit stronger. The higher waves you get the greater the rewards. This concept works like other survival modes in other games like Blazblue Continuum Shift’s Abyss mode. The problem with Dungeon Defender’s survival mode is the enemies are way too numerous. There was a time I was playing in a group four and we got fatigued by the sheer number of enemies that had to be killed. We got upto wave 16 until we all mentally checked out and died on purpose. Before we died, the previous wave we had to kill 5000+ enemies and the wave before that was 3000+. The problem with too many monsters affected my computer performance, I was lagging horribly and shooting in random directions hopefully hitting them and lastly, invisible enemies which made it difficult to know why or what was killing me.
- Nightmare mode – (Yeah this is a QQ moment) – Although the intention is to make it more difficult. They made it too difficult. Prior when it was just easy, medium, hard and insane, there was a steady progression in terms of skill development and gear. The gear you receive in medium helps on hard. The hard gear helps on insane. In nightmare, this is not the case and you’re going to die a lot. The major problems I found were that enemies could go through barricades, perhaps a bug, but when you’re trying to defend key locations and the enemies can 1-2 hit kill you and your defences, it is not a fun experience when they walk through the barricades and start wailing on the fragile defences. The other problem was the inclusion of a new monster the spider. The spider does not spawn at the entrance but rather around the player, the spiders rush towards your character and focus their attacks on them, they have a range attack which slows and damages and a charge that instantly kills you unless properly geared. To me this changes the dynamic of the game, to a gear oriented game rather than strategy. In nightmare mode the enemies do hit harder and the heroes towers and attacks do less damage, I love that aspect, it makes it challenging but it makes for a more frustrating experience when you die from random stuff happening.
Final Comments
I found this game enjoyable and taking large portion of my days. There is steady progression and there is a sense of accomplishment when the strategy I or my teammates devised defeated the evil horde threatening to destroy the crystal succeeds.
P.S. This is all opinion and different people may have a different experience.