Next-Gen Reviews

Enemies consist of Goblins, Mages, Skeletons, Archers and Ogres.  All are capable of making a mess of your hard work but if you are to succeed, you feel that your effort was worth it.

 

You can choose to be one of 4 heroes, Apprentice (Mage), Squire (Knight), Huntress (Pixie) or Monk.  They each have a basic attack whether it be melee or ranged and on top of that they have special abilities which in the heat of the battle are vital.

 

Once you have looked through the characters and chosen a character that best suits your play style you are given a huge amount of customisation options.   I chose Apprentice and went on to name him, change the colours of his clothes and then change the look of my crystal.

 

You start at a tavern where you can buy weapons armour and pets!  Yes, I said pets…..  These are little creatures that float around near your head and are able to help you in a number of ways depending on the pet it self.  You can also upgrade weapons, armour and pets and test their damage on dummies that are located around the tavern.

 

There are two different modes to play, Campaign and challenges.  The campaign is a story of four heroes who are trying to defeat evil and the challenges vary from completing levels without towers to defeating hordes of explosive goblins.

 

Both the campaign and challenges offer difficulties starting from easy and going to insane. To be honest easy is not even that easy and insane really is insane.  This is not a bad thing because during the harder difficulties you often find great expensive items although not always better than your own!

 

The game is very smooth and navigating the menu system is easy.  You can hot key any of your towers or abilities to your D-Pad in order to save time but I don't think you would ever need to hot key the towers.  I personally had self heal, overcharge, mana bomb and repair because to me they were the most important.

 

Visually the game is second to none.  The design and layout are brilliant and up there with other great looking arcade games like Shadow Complex.  Dungeon Defenders is a beautifully bright coloured magical world that makes you want to do nothing but smile and I '‘am pretty sure that no one will be able to complain about the game in this area.

Levels are very well designed to constantly give you a challenge and make you work hard in order to succeed and the music lingering around in the background is quite nice too.

 

 

Some things I did not like…...

 

The first thing I noticed was the menu screen due to its bad fit.  Part of the picture was cut off and it caused problems when trying to navigate through the game.  I mentioned this to the devs and was quickly reassured that you can change the User Interface so that the menu fitted to your liking.

 

The auto target system can also get annoying.  At times you will want to lock on to a particular enemy such as a mage or Ogre but due to there being another enemy in the way, you will automatically target that enemy.  This can sometimes get you in big trouble and also often lead to a death or towers being obliterated.

 

I love looting in games but at times I felt that I was constantly collecting rubbish.  I very rarely found equipment that was better than what I already had so I mainly sold it for mana and purchased upgrades.

 

These are small annoyances that can be easily forgotten due to the games greatness so don’t let this put you off.

 

Overall Dungeon Defenders is a game that has everything a tower defence fan would want.

 

For 1200MSP Dungeon Defenders gives you your moneys worth and far more especially with its online co op challenges and endless re-​playability.

 

Anyone that decides to give this game a miss is depriving their arcade collection of greatness.

 

9.5/10