Dungeon Defenders Review

 

Trendy Entertainment has given us a fun game that game actually make you want to play it longer than your first thought you would. Dungeon Defenders is the first competitive four-player co-op, tower defense/action-RPG hybrid for XBLA, PSN and PC that delivers the visceral combat of action RPGs and the strategic element of tower defense games. Combining the best elements of a variety of genres and offering a level of depth no other in this category has yet reached, Dungeon Defenders casts you into an ancient land and create a hero from one of four distinct classes. Develop, upgrade and manage your skills, pets, towers and abilities to fight off the evil from Etheria – and take your character online to share your wares, pets and skill with four-player local and online co-op!

 

 

The game has is unique story, 4 different characters and the ability to upgrade them often. You fight wave after wave of enemies to defend your crystal. You can choose from a warrior, mage, elf and a monk. Each of these different classes has their own playing style and strengths and weaknesses. You get to set up defenses that are towers, (a tower defense type of game) but you can still attack enemies with your selected character. The locations and types of defense towers you build are very important to your strategy in surviving each wave and not letting The locations and types of defense towers you build are very important to your strategy in surviving each wave and not letting your crystal being destroyed.

 

 

When you kill or defeat enemies you gain XP to level up. Each time you level up you get points to spend on making your character tougher, more magic and such. When you reach certain levels you unlock your characters better traps and defenses. When using the warrior the best trap we liked when playing, (mind you when we played we did do co-op to have more help instead of single player) is the spinner. This tower has 7-8 blades on it that when bad guys get close it spins and deals tons of damage to enemies and even more when fully upgraded. Putting one of these in a narrow hallway or a stairway and letting the enemies walk into it and attacking from behind makes for a quick death for almost everyone.

 

 

You can always find better items, weapons and armor, as well as using mana to upgrade your armor and weapons to have them help you more. This gets expensive but is well worth it to help your character. At the end of each wave you complete you can swap out your items, armor or even swap your character out and use a different one to use different traps and defense’s. This is all done by using the forge that pops up at the end of each wave. As a bonus, you can play up to 4 player co-op and each player can have their own pet. A pet follows you around and attacks any enemies that come into its range. A pet can also be leveled up and upgraded to do more damage and give characters a bonus as well.

 

 

The controls of Dungeon Defenders are pretty straight forward with attacking, blocking and setting traps. A “lock-on” to enemies would have been more than useful at times in this game. Also some time you may be attacking a orc or boss and your character will just seem to jump to another enemy 5 feet away and attack that one. Like I said a lock on would of easily solved this issue. Now it may just be us at Game 2 Gamer, but when you get further into the game everything is more expensive to buy, armor, pets and all, but it seems like collecting the money to buy it doesn’t come in fast enough and it takes forever to save up enough to get the items and upgrade your characters items.

 

 

The graphics are very surprising for a download game. It has very great looks to it with art and comic-book style mixed into it for cut scenes. Dungeon Defenders doesn’t just end after you beat the game ether. You get better loot and items for beating it on harder levels or trying out other modes it offers like survival or challenges. Challenges can be anything like not using defenses and towers or your crystal will move around every 30 seconds and you have to defend it. This game has endless fun and hours upon hours of game play and is well worth picking up.

 

We hope that Trendy Entertainment will offer some DLC content for this, more items, pets, levels or characters. I will admit the game is very addicting and we at the office find ourselves playing this instead of doing our work. And that’s not a bad thing. Dungeon Defenders is a very nice change to RPG / tower defense games and we look forward to more. We are a fan of this game and recommend it to our friends!

Game 2 Gamer’s Final Score 3.5 / 5

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