Dungeon Defenders

[BobTD]

The game in question is Dungeon Defenders. A game that I passed over on steams store without a second thought. In fact if truth be told i had felt the urge to pick up a tower defender but was only really interested in a game called "Orcs must die". A somewhat similar game for the same price that I have now come to realize probably cant live up to the multi class multiplayer RPG style of Dungeon Defenders.

The real draw of this game comes from leveling your character up and hunting better gear. Gear consists of your standard armor: head, chest, gloves and feet as well as a weapon and a pet. Each piece of armor has a level cap that you can upgrade it to if you invest heavily with your hard earned mana. This is the same quality loot of lot system as you would see in a game like Diablo or Torchlight, and is just as addicting.

The above image shows you the in game HUD for one of the four playable character classes. My wizard is in the Halloween spirit currently, being dressed as a mummy wizard. The top left shows how many enemies are in the next wave, and the names of the players on the map. The right side shows the wave, what stage the game is in (divided between build and combat phases). And finally we have the bottom showing health, mana, skills. xp bar and on the right name, lvl and current map score (automatically added to the leaderboards).

The controls are actually quite well polished on the PC version. You use a third person over the shoulder view with a targeting icon for combat, but zooms out when you press the middle mouse button or both left and right mouse buttons for your tower placement. It can also be scrolled out at any time with the mouse wheel for a more tactics oriented view.

The point of defending is not to prevent monsters from crossing the map, but to defend your crystal. I always call it a nexus, because I play to much LoL. Anyways, there can be more than one crystal on the map but if you loose a single one its game over.

And the fun does not stop there, there are challenge game modes that will change the game play, from a PVP arena to assaulting a crystal while mobs defend in a crazy role reversal. They even have a game mode where you defend a giant from other monsters. Again, its refined, it polished, I have no complaints here.

There are a few ways to play the game. On the Xbox (and presumably PS3) you simply have offline play and online play and the characters cant cross over. With the PC setup you can play online in an open setting encouraging mods and tampering with character data, that you can also bring any offline character into. Or you can play on the Trendynet servers in a somewhat more secure setting that aims to keep characters legit and make the score boards more relevant.

I do have a few concerns about server stability, as it was rocky at launch (but is apparently getting better). Also Trendy is a new independent developer so it cant be helped that their first big game would need some patches. On that note, it is interesting to note that this is an exciting game model we are looking at from a business standpoint.

Trendynet claims they make AAA quality digital content. Basically they want to compete with mainstream quality games with digitally downloaded games for a fraction of what you would normally pay. Dungeon Defenders is a game that is more fun and more polished then a lot of games you can pick up off the shelf.

There are also mobile cross platform versions of the game I haven't had a chance to try out. The idea that the game plays on hand held devices of different types, on the same server, is actually pretty exciting.

 

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Thanks for reading! full size versions of all the pictures can be found on my STEAM account!