Trendy Entertainment’s Dungeon Defenders takes several different game genres and rolls them into a delicious blend featuring 37 secret herbs and spices. Actually, it’s as if a hack-and-slash adventure RPG and your favorite tower defense game decided to combine to form some freakish multiplayer mutant that’s addictive, fun, and an absolute blast to play with friends.
There’s a lot going on in Dungeon Defenders, as you’re able to min/max in quite a few ways from level up choices, gear selection and upgrades/customization, and pets. It can feel a little overbearing at first, as there is a lot to figure out in your first hour or so of gameplay, but rest assured - you’ll get paid out big dividends on your time investment.
There are a number of intuitive gameplay aspects that will make you say “Hey, that’s awesome!” once you learn of their existence, such as the auto-sell functionality of all the loot at the end of each round that doesn’t get picked up, or boss loot going directly to players to prevent ninja-looting, or the ability to evaluate loot while it’s sitting on the ground before even picking it up.
The core of the game is as it sounds – You’re going to be defending your way through dungeons. Depending on how salty you’re feeling and the friends you’re playing with, difficulties range from easy to insane, featuring something for everyone.
You’ll be able to utilize your traps and turrets as well as your own weaponry to lay waste to legions of orcs, goblin sappers, evil wizards, wyverns, bosses and more. Depending on your playstyle, you can chose to focus on being a more tower oriented player or one that gets his or her hands dirty in the center of the action, but most of the time you’ll be doing both to some degree.
Each class has a variety of different defenses to summon as well as two class specific active abilities and other useful skills, such as healing, tower healing, and tower upgrading.
The four classes currently in the game all have extremely different playstyles – The tower master Apprentice, the defensive Squire, ranged trapper and deadeye Huntress, and the aura-commanding Monk. You’re able to swap to other classes at your convenience and take advantage your account-wide inventory. Two more classes are on the way, the Barbarian and an unnamed steampunk-style class of some kind.
Dungeon Defenders is playable solo, but this review is approaching it from the perspective of multiplayer – this is where the game really shines. There’s nothing like taking on swarms of enemies with your friends in co-op, and there is plenty of loot and xp to go around. Up to 4 players can play together, with the difficulty scaling to accommodate for more defenders.
Gameplay revolves around build and combat phases, with the end goal to protect your crystal from progressively harder, more numerous and diverse waves of creatures. If your crystal goes, the mission is over, and your party can travel back to the “town hub” known as the Tavern to recuperate and get ready to set out again.
Not only are there plenty of campaign levels to explore on different difficulties, but Dungeon Defenders offers a wide variety of other “challenge modes” to tantalize tower builders, including modes where there are no towers allowed at all. There are leaderboards as well for those players out there seeking to show off their Dungeon Defender skills.
Dungeon Defenders is fully moddable when not played on the official TrendyNet servers (which is also the only place to experience holiday/event content), so if you’re NOT looking to run into players who set their score to 1 billion and flood the maps with 1000 turrets, be sure to select TrendyNet play.
A dungeon crawl combined with tower defense is certainly a bold genrebender, and Trendy Entertainment pulls this feat off on all fronts. With 70 levels of gameplay and numerous challenges, Dungeon Defenders offers an incredible hack-and-slash tower-defense experience for you and up to three friends and is available on PSN, XBLA, and Steam.
If you’ve any interest in either of the parent genres of games, do yourself a favor and treat yourself to Dungeon Defenders – you will not be disappointed.
A review copy of Dungeon Defenders was provided for this review.
Get the best news and spiciest editorials on online games - Subscribe to get updates and follow the action on Twitter! You can also follow updates on Facebook!
Comments