Dungeon Defenders, from Trendy Entertainment and Reverb Publishing, is the latest in the tower defense genre. Don't expect innovation, but if you can make it through the poor menu design, there is a fun game to play with some buddies.
This new XBLA, PSN and Steam fantasy-themed tower defense game sticks fairly close to the tower defense formula. Action is separated into two phases: the build phase, which allows players to deploy any number of physical and magical towers and traps, and an action phase, which is an all-out war to prevent enemies from reaching the Eternia crystal (the thing you're defending).
There's a hefty learning curve to Dungeon Defenders. At first, the game's colorful art style and cute-looking characters will disarm you, making you believe you have everything you need to defeat its hordes of enemies. Then, it will slap you in the face and demand perfection. I don't think I got the hang of the game, its strategies or its gameplay systems until I played three or four hours. But once I figured it out, it was a fun to play...with friends.
Dungeon Defenders is best ventured with at least one friend (though it supports up to four players co-op); this game would moderately hold interest as a single player game, but really starts to click when multiple people are running around together stopping orcs and trolls.
There are many, many levels to Dungeon Defenders, and each level will require you to defeat progressively higher amounts of waves of enemies. It's not rare to be facing down the arrows, swords and hammers of hundreds of enemies that want nothing but to destroy your Eternia crystal. The game can seem quite mean at times, having you deal with hundreds of slobbering enemies, then throwing an incredibly strong Ogre at you along with some rather nasty flying wyverns that have a straight line to your gem. You'll lose some rounds all right, but the game will force you to learn how to be better. A few times to the game over screen and you'll be better prepared for next time.
When you are taking down the horde, it's not all cut and dry. There is an awkward auto-targeting system, which will hone in on enemies near you. The camera will jerk side to side at points as the game auto-targets enemies around you, or, in some cases, enemies that are not even remotely near your position. The imprecise targeting system can really be a bummer and put you in a bad position. After killing an enemy, sometimes the target won't appear on the enemy next to the one you’ve defeated. Instead, it will sometimes appear on an enemy way across the map, before correcting and finding a target close at hand. It's an awkward system and, in heated situations, can fail you completely, but it's something you learn to live with.
The game has some information communication issues. It throws a lot of information at you through sloppy menus and pop up boxes; you'll shake your head more than a few times as you try to figure out what the game is trying to convey exactly. It doesn't help that the game has a general UI problem either. The developer chose a Russian Doll-styled presentation of menus over menus over menus. It is unfortunately confusing and your eye reels from absorbing too much overlying information. Often, you're just trying to figure out what you're looking at or selecting; even after hours of playing the game, me and a friend were unsure where to find certain pieces of information and often felt as if we were getting a lot of useless information thrown at us.
If you can look past the information conveyance issues, some odd quirks here and there and a tough learning curve, there's actually a pretty fun game to be found in Dungeon Defenders; just bring some friends with you to share the ups and downs.
Version Tested: Xbox 360
