iPhone App Reviews

Dungeonslayer

Swain Valasek | Aug 2, 2009 Games

User rating: (3 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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There’s been a growing trend among iPhone game releases lately and if you had to sum it up in one phrase it would be ‘has potential but needs work’.  Adding +1 to this trend is the action RPG Dungeonslayer (DS hereafter) from Needsnacks Studios.  This game will remind one of Diablo from the screenshots/video and certainly it appears to draw inspiration from that classic but alas, after playing through the game it’s clear the consummate Diablo clone for iPhone has not yet been delivered.  Enough then about Diablo, let’s get down to specifics about Dungeonslayer, a game which I do like (despite my opening comments) and have lots to say about so buckle up for a lengthy review.

You start the game by choosing a gender (male, female) and class (warrior, ranger, mage) after which you are immediately dropped into the town of Krendel.  There’s an elderly wise-looking man standing right in front of you so the natural inclination is to select him.  When you do he introduces himself as Fergus Lain and offers to train you in a valuable skill in return for helping protect his town.  Fair enough; you pick a skill and after talking to him again get your first quest and away you go.  The quests loosely tie together into what I can only tentatively call a ‘story’ as the amount of narrative is trivial and unimportant to the gameplay anyway; those that like a juicy bit of fiction with their action RPG will not find it here.  Anywho at that point (had you any gold) you could visit the town store which is run by Fiona, a broad who never says a word throughout the game.  There you can suit up for action with weapons, armor, potions of health or energy (magic points) and of course sell stuff.  Since you start the game practically naked and definitely penniless, say bye to Fiona the mute and it’s off to the adventure.  Beyond Fergus and the store, the only other locations are 3 unmarked dungeon entrances which roughly correspond to E, SE and SW of town.  You’re free to enter any dungeon at any time but since they are only meant to be entered at logical points in the quest, you just get your ass handed to you if you enter the wrong one.  Still, it’s fun and cool to have free access to all the dungeons and I applaud the feature.  Side note, when you die in this game you are fully resurrected in town with all your XP and loot intact.

So the formula is straightforward: get quest from Fergus, grind through dungeon to complete quest, redeem quest with Fergus, repeat (you can only have 1 quest at a time).  The only thing he ever gives as reward though is gold which (as I’ll get into later) sadly becomes less important as the game goes on.  Fortunately there is real reward in the loot drops within the dungeons.  There are 2 quests for the first 2 dungeons and 1 for the last at which point you ‘win’ and can replay the game with all your XP/loot and ramped up dungeon difficulty (good feature).  Special mention goes to the fact that dungeons are randomly generated so each new game will be a little different.  Each dungeon has 10 levels with a boss at the bottom which is always part of a quest event.  There are also mini-bosses to be found on L5 of each dungeon which aren’t quest events but fun, great to see them included and wish there were more.  Every 10 experience levels you gain a skill point to spend magically enhancing your character.  These come in 3 branches per class, each with 4 upgrades, some stacking upon the prior but some unique for 12 total per class.  You can then place these skills on a quick launch bar for instant access in battle.  All in all a good implementation here, no complaints.  Onscreen at all times is a minimap and blue and red globes corresponding to health and energy respectively.  You can touch the center of each globe to auto-quaff a boost potion if you have it in inventory.  Dealing with items and equipping your character is via what at first seems a standard RPG paper doll interface but for whatever reason there were some decisions made that klutzify the whole experience which I’ll touch on in a moment.  You have 3 independent save game slots and a 4th autosave for when you exit via the Home button (thoughtful feature).  You can throw up a magic portal at any time to slip back to town to sell loot or stock up on pots (that’s potions for you RPG initiates).  Movement is accomplished by touching the screen where you want to go and holding to continue moving.  Enemies are targeted with a touch and you’ll continue to attack that specific enemy until someone dies or you manually run away; you must continue to target enemies manually as there is no ‘auto-fight’ option.

Here’s a quick bestiary for the hell of it:

• SE dungeon – lizard, bat, slime
• SW dungeon – skeleton fighter/archer, zombie, orc
• E dungeon – skeleton fighther/archer, zombie

• No screen flip (why oh why is this always the case).
• iTunes music is supported.  This is great because there is no BGM whatsoever.  The SFX are generally underwhelming.  The steady plod of your character’s footsteps never changes and quickly gets old, the monsters make only subtle sounds, not once do you hear the clang of steel for example and the ambient sounds consist of something resembling a bionic bird chirp and a back-masked vacuum cleaner.
• The graphics are far below what the iPhone is capable of producing (check out Underworlds for comparison in that dept).  The game is basically fully 3D but the models are exceedingly low detail and almost nothing is textured.  Though your player model does change as you equip items it’s a very weak implementation as my warrior equipped with full plate mail and a powerful mace looked like he was wearing his finest blue (blue??) livery and carrying a sceptre; like he was headed to a royal ball rather than a dungeon teeming with evil to vanquish.  There is almost no detail in the town, to the point where everything looks like it’s floating on a soupy green cloud.  The dungeons have marginally more detail but the bottom line here is nothing in this game qualifies as eye candy.  Also the animations throughout are stiff and even downright bizarre (looking at you skeletons).  A bit humorous was how my warrior spent the first few levels fighting with his bare hands yet the game displayed the animation of attacking with a weapon.
• Controls for movement are ok but the game needs the option of a D-pad.  My fat finger was constantly obscuring the screen and the resulting accidental drag of my other fingers across the screen often needlessly triggered potion quaffs.
• As one might expect, the game slows down a good bit when lots of enemies are onscreen (though still playable).  However, I also experienced very frequent slowdowns just walking around with nothing in sight and this became quite annoying.  It was almost as if the game was still spending resources processing all nearby enemies even though completely off-screen.
• Enemy targeting is poorly implemented.  There’s no onscreen indication of what you’re attacking beyond a banner at the top of the screen.  During encounters it’s not uncommon for a bunch of enemies to get basically stacked on top of each and it gets messy.  The game really needs a method of highlighting exactly which enemy you’re attacking as it becomes very important later in the game to target specific enemies first.
• I found the game boring at first, to the point that if I wasn’t knowingly going to play through for this review my first impression might have cause me to quit after the first 10-15 min.  Enhancing the character creation process, adding more story and starting the player with a little money for the store would help here.  After you reach experience level 6 or 7 or so the pace picks up and it’s much better as you spend less time backtracking from dead ends or roaming around aimlessly and more time fighting big hordes.
• The minimap is for some reason nailed to the xy axis while the game itself is displayed isometrically.  It probably took a good hour for my brain to get comfortable with this arrangement but it was definitely confusing at first.  I assume this was done to save space onscreen but I would much rather see the minimap also isometric and just let us toggle it on and off.
• The town portal spell is 1-way only so you can’t then get back to where you were in the dungeon.  This makes it kinda silly, especially since there’s no penalty for dying; you might as well just play until you buy the farm and get back to town that way.
• Loot drops take ‘random’ to an absurd level.  Basically, even though you’re only playing 1 class, items from all 3 classes can be dropped as loot, even the boss drops!  There’s nothing more frustrating than finally taking down a boss and he drops a freaking Robe of Magey Goodness and you’re a warrior (all items in the game are class-specific).  This really is nuts and I hope it gets changed.  The only upside to this is being able to mule the useless kitsch up to the store to sell (for only a pittance though).
• Related to above, it would be cool to have a persistent storage resource that is available across save slots so you could run all 3 classes through the game pseudo-simultaneously and buff your low level peons with loot you found with your 40th level whatever.
• Minor but descending a level in the dungeon often throws up what appears to be a page from the instructions; I have to assume this is a bug.  Also if you exit a dungeon by ascending the stairs to town, you’re immediately deposited in the center of town, not the dungeon entrance which is a bit disorienting.
• Money becomes sorta pointless as the game goes on.  The store rarely changes inventory and even then it becomes far too expensive and you find better stuff in the dungeons anyway.  The only thing the store is even needed for in the present implementation is to buy (cheap) potions and to sell stuff.  You end up with far more money than you’ll ever need so the only fun at that point is amassing a horde for the fun of it.  A much more varied inventory and a bit more affordability (plus a little personality for Fiona) would help things here.
• Related to the above, even when you do want to buy from the store, it not only displays items from other clases that you can’t even use but will gladly sell them to you (they make nice doorstops)!  Oh and even if you buy something you think you can use, it typically stocks items well beyond your current level yet gives you no warning that you can’t even equip it yet!  Forget selling back in that case as items immediately depreciate by like 90%.  It only took 1 time selling my good chest plate for something better in the store, only to find I couldn’t equip it and couldn’t even buy my old one back so had to roam around for another 3 experience levels with greatly reduced armor (whew) to just ignore the store items completely.
• Only being able to upgrade skills once every 10 levels makes it rather difficult to enjoy all the skills as you basically have to become 110th level to have them all.  Might be nice to have Fergus hand out skill points as quest rewards.
• Final point and needing the most discussion is the overall UI; in a word…clunky.  Unlike most every other RPG, DS separates the inventory and paper doll display into separate screens, forcing you to waste time managing them individually.  Inexplicably, on the character equip and store screens there’s a button to display the ingame instructions right above the Ok button!  Needless to say, I must have brought up those sumbitch instructions 1000 times when all I wanted was to get back to the game.  Just no need for this and the button should be removed.  The general interaction throughout the UI is single tap (ST) to select an item but double tap (DT) to display critical information.  This decision alone is 90% of my complaint about the UI, mainly because the game doesn’t even give you the most general info with ST.  I was constantly in need of item info but in a never-ending struggle with the game registering my DT as an ST and subsequently wasting pointless amounts of time struggling to get what I need so I could simply get back to playing.  I would recommend ST display all the information of DT and just require an Ok to proceed.  Either that or change it to ‘press and hold’ to get info.  Either way DT needs to go and fast.

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Tags: $3.99, action rpg, rpg lite, Swain Valasek