Dungeon Defenders

Developer: Trendy Entertainment
Released: Oct 2011
Hours Played: 13.1
Simlar To: Orcs Must Die / Sanctum / Sang-Froid - Tales of Werewolves
Rating: 3/5 Parsnips



GAMEPLAY
Of all the tower defense games covered in this project, Dungeon Defenders is the most lavish and ambitious. Created in the same mould as Orcs Must Die, this is an action TD game where you control a hero who fights toe to toe with the hordes. Like its closest competitor, Orcs Must Die, Dungeon Defenders requires you to defend your base (a large crystal) against hordes of goblins and orcs who are initially assembled on the other side of the entrances to the battle area. Unlike OMD, you are given unlimited time to place towers at your leisure during the Build Phase. It's a similar system whereby you hit the short-cut key to bring up the selected tower and use the left mouse button to place and rotate it. 

 

BALANCE & PACE
However, when placing the tower you'll have to grapple with an annoying system where you are frozen in place and forced to place the tower within a small radius around you. Once you're happy with your placement, you unleash the horde letting the towers do their thing. You also hack or blast away at the enemy with your hero. Between waves, you collect the dropped mana to buy, repair and upgrade towers. The game eases you in nicely and I felt the game had a lot of promise judging from the early stages. You can go back and do early levels on easy difficulty and I felt this was an effective, user-friendly way of learning the ropes. The downside is that as the game gets challenging, the action gets busy and frantic to the point where views from the camera got confusing and awkward to control.
 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN
If a prize were awarded for sheer amount of menus and stats Dungeon Defenders would be an instant nomination. On hitting Play Online or Play Local, before wading through adverts for DLC (which the game has by the truck-load) you get another two screens to clarify which of your heroes you wish to use. Then you get a Mission Set Up screen to choose your mission and level of difficulty but it's best to visit your tavern first. The game gets a 10 out of 10 for the way it displays stats; you can view your best time and scores within all of the missions and on each of the different difficulty settings. The Mission Set-Up screen is also nicely laid out and displays information clearly. There is also enough facts and figures on weapon and armour stats to keep nerds happy throughout - if they can understand it.


PROGRESS SYSTEM
Your tavern is your home base where, as well as the aforementioned Mission Set-Up screen, you get access to: the inventory or item box (where you keep surplus items like weapons and armour); the character screen (showing stats to do with health and mana) and your stats screen (showing the best time and score as well as other info for each mission at each difficulty setting). Rest assured there is enough information here to keep the most demanding geek busy for hours. It is all very stable and solidly done with graphics looking not dissimilar to the Torchlight games. However, I would argue that the overall system for comparing resistances or how weapons and armour affect skills may be a tad overcomplex. Pop-ups explaining some of these figures would definitely have been useful for the noobs amongst us. 

CONCLUSION
The wonky camera view in tight areas mixed with the mayhem in later levels and the mis-match of over-powered bosses hamper an otherwise good game. In early waves the camera, movement and view is silky smooth - the way the hero bounces along was first-class. However in the later more hectic waves, when more enemies pile in, I was often unsure who or what I was firing at. This was more acutely felt in confined spaces usually in and around my crystal. Finally, ushering in a final boss on the last wave of a mission is a convention in TD games but in Dungeon Defenders I don't know if blasting away at a boss with 20K+ hit-points after battling against many enemies (around 100-400 hitpoints) is an entirely enjoyable experience. Unfortunately, all these issues added up to an ultimate premature uninstall of this promising game.