So it has been awhile since I’ve posted now for a number of reasons I don’t really need to go into on here but I am going to try and start posting more regularly now. Instead of focusing of daily posting about the news I find for that day I think I will only post about what I am actively engaged or excited about. That said, since I’ve stopped posting I have played quite a few games that you guys might be interested in hearing about. I am going to abandon the numerical measurement system for video games because it is difficult to quantify everything and instead let you hear what I think about the game; its successes, failures, and how I think it impacts the gaming industry.
As a coming back to writing post, I think I will write about the game I’ve played most since I stopped writing which is Dungeon Defenders. Originally this game was made for mobile devices using Epic’s UT3 engine but the young company, Trendy Entertainment, decided to take its hit mobile game to the next level and make it a full PC game (and maybe Mac, I don’t really know). 200 hours into the game as of last night I can confidently say that I have experienced just about everything you can in the game.
As I said before Dungeon Defenders was designed for mobile devices turned PC, it was a 15 dollar game and I’ve dumped more hours into it than most games I get my hands on. In fact I have put more hours into this game in the month and a half it has been out than I have put into games like MW2, TF2 and Civilization V so it pretty much goes without saying that I’m addicted. Being a mobile game originally, it was plagued with little content compared to what PC gamers have come to expect but the developers (all 17 of them) have been adding content and patching their game at a rate I have literally never seen before. In Rift when a major patch came out and there were bugs they would come out with a hotfix for the patch in a couple days, TE would have a hotfix submitted to Steam within hours. Sometimes this doesn’t come without its own issues but as a young company trying to keep their fan base it was generally well received.
Company, cost, patches aside and we are left with the actual game and if you are still reading this I commend you. The game itself is a third person (with the option of first person) action rpg tower defense, which may seem like a lot to take in. Think your typical tower defense game but where you control a character in the mix of the madness having an effect on each level. With 70 levels, 5 different types of armors for each of the 4 slots with endless prefixes changing the stats and tons of different weapons and even more stats, there is a huge amount of rpg to the game. Part of the reason why the game is so addicting is the rpg side of it but at the same time it’s the competition of getting your name on the leader boards because your strategy and tower placement is better than the rest.
With at least 250,000 players (this is an old number, I’d suspect closer to 500,000 now) there is a lot of competition on the leader boards. Last I checked I held the number 1 spot for 2 different maps/modes, but that is out of a possibility of at least 100 different rankings. Beyond the rush of rankings the developers are updating their game with new content and fixing current content all the time keeping the game very active and fresh.
There are 8 classes, 4 come with the original game and 4 are gender swapped dlc (with slightly different skills). They are always adding new maps and if you play on the open server even more because TE released their version of the Unreal Developer Kit with the games code so that you can mod to your hearts content. The UDK is actually pretty easy to use; with no experience at all I was able to make a simple level without much trouble. With it made I could technically upload it and let others play it but I dare not embarrass myself because the modding community is active and some cool maps are being made all the time.
This is the season for Steam sales, this is a 15 dollar game that I have spent more time in than most 60 dollar games and in this season chances are you will find the game and all of its dlc (a lot of it’s free but all of it together probably isn’t more than 8 dollars right now) on Steam for a great price. I highly recommend picking this game up this holiday season, you get a good game that is a unique style and very fun, you get to support a start up indie developer committed to its community, and you get to kill tons and tons of goblins which is always a plus.
That is it for now but there are a bunch of other games that I will try to post about soon (Skyrim, BF3, Orcs Must Die, Gears of War 3, Dark Souls and more)
