Saturday, January 15, 2011

[Game Review] Dungeon Defenders



About time I get something into the Android category. I was going to post this yesterday, though I'm glad I didn't. This morning I awoke to version 2.0, which made some nice improvements.

For those who don't know, Dungeon Defenders is a cross between tower defense and action RPG genres, each class having it's own summonable defences and weapons. The gameplay is very reminiscent of tower defense maps on Starcraft and Warcraft, but with character building, and of course, it's mobile.

First of all, this game is very unique. Aside from the Blizzard references earlier, you don't really see much of a combination of these genres. You also don't see as much co-operative tower defense outside of those as well. Although I am sure that more good games such as this will be coming to Androids, at the moment, it is in a class of it's own.

The game has simple, easy to understand controls, although it can take some getting used to the touchscreen gamepad. You move with the "joystick" in the bottom left, and everything else is controlled by the other buttons, such as the attack button in the bottom right, and jump button right above it.

As for the fixes in the 2.0 upgrade, there is a few very nice ones. Being played on multiple devices gives its fair share of bugs, the main one being the interface being cut off and scaled strangely. Before 2.0, all portrait menus and screens were upside down, not absolutely horrible, but a bit wierd to get used to. Now those have been fixed. So far, the only thing I have been able to see cut off is the options menu, which doesn't really impact much.(only the top name is cut off) The best fix from this though was the addition of a chase camera, which means you don't have to be constantly spinning your camera manually. My only disappointment is that this only works at the closest zoom, not when you're zoomed out, but oh well, better than nothing.

Another simple compliment is the speed of it. Although my phone, the HTC Desire Z,(aka T-Mobile G2, in their list) is listed as midranged, it has no trouble playing the game with no lag at all. I suggest anyone with lag to maybe close other processes, or turn down the video setting.

Of course, everything has it's negatives. I've personally never been able to try the tutorial, because it fails on my phone. I have heard, however, that it is annoying, because the instructions crowd the screen. Another big one is that after the upgrade, I was required to re-download the game files, all of them. That is 600MB, by the way. Hopefully they fix this so that only new files are downloaded. Something I'd almost say is a good thing, too, is that it tends to get my phone very very hot, so I can't play for too long. At least there is something limiting my gaming time :P

Overall, if your Android device supports it, I highly suggest the game, it is definitely worth paying for, just make sure you are using WiFi for the download, so you don't waste away your device's data plan.

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