Developer: Chromatic Games
Publisher: Chromatic Games
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Tested on: PC
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened – Review
After the successful release of the original Dungeon Defenders in 2011 and the game’s sequel in 2017, Chromatic Games has now released the next game in this game series, Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. With the earlier games having a great reception, you would think this title will again be a great success, but after all the time that has been put in developing this game, this isn’t really the case. It appears to be filled with glitches and strange things that can even make the game unplayable at times.
Story
Eteria has always been a land of living legends, defending against an ancient evil known as The Old Ones. Using the powers of the Eternia crystals, they were sealed away. The brave heroes accidentally unleashed this ancient force, summoning an ancient army of demons, goblins and dragons to reclaim their lost power. While the heroes fought well and achieved victory after victory, the heroes continued to hone their powers and rise as the defenders of the lands. An unseen evil created a new threat to foil the heroes’ noble quest and make Eteria theirs once and for all. The heroes had their powers sapped and made smaller than before. Using their wisdom and experience, they must defend the lands of Eteria once again as they’re flung into battles of the past. Will they unravel the mysteries of this rift in time?
Besides the intro that tells its interesting background story, the game doesn’t really appear to feature much of a story mode or provide any addition to this story. You just move one from one stage to the next one after completing it.
Graphics
The graphics of the game aren’t the best but for the style of its artwork, it looks okay. The different environments in the levels all look quite nice and each has its own theme based on its location. You would expect that the characters’ outfits will change depending on the armor you’d equip, but it won’t. The colors of armor and equipment in your inventory seem to change with each action that you take. For example, when you equip one piece of armor, all other pieces of equipment will change color from blue to like yellow, red or any other random color.
We even had many difficulties with a glitch that would make an armor description get stuck on the screen, which will cover most of your line of sight and makes the game fully unplayable as you can’t see anything. To fix this, the game needs to be restarted as it will stay visible in the game’s title screen.
Sound
Each area in this game will have its own background music, from the tavern where you start playing to all the locations where you defend the crystals of Eternia. While this brings quite a diverse range of music into the game and it does sound pretty good, the melodies won’t last that long and will repeat a lot when playing, which makes it quite annoying after a while. The tutorial is accompanied by some voice acting, but when you’re done with this, you won’t hear anything like it anymore.
Gameplay
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is said to be an action RPG and a tower defense game. It offers an ideal couch co-op experience, but for this to work well on a PC, you should have access to multiple controllers for a good experience. After playing for a while, you won’t really find a lot of RPG elements in this game at all. The game is solely focused on tower defense gameplay while you are walking and running around your tower and deal some damage to help your turrets. Purely as a tower defense game, this game will suffice, but only after all the bugs and even game-breaking faults in the game have been removed.
When you start playing this game, you get to choose which class you want to play. You can choose between the Squire, Apprentice, Hunter and Monk class. All these classes have their own specialties and a specific type of playing style. While the Apprentice uses magic and the Huntress uses arrows, they attack from a range while the Squire and Monk classes are close combat fighters. When choosing a class, each class also has its own difficulty level assigned to indicate how difficult playing with a specific class will be. The Apprentice and the Huntress are by far the easiest classes to play as they attack from a distance while the Squire is a close combat unit and the Monk is more of a support unit. With each class having different types of attacks, each class also has its own arsenal of structures to place as a defense to protect your crystal.
This game can be quite fun to play with others, but in some cases, it feels even necessary to play with others. As you play with one class, you’ll only have access to the structures bound to that class, while the structures from other classes can sometimes be necessary to complete huge waves of enemies without your crystal being destroyed. In many cases, the range of your structures won’t be big enough to kill all the enemies, so each side from where enemies will draw near has to be guarded by a ‘live’ player as well for a successful defense.
While the game plays quite good when wandering around the area, fighting against enemy creatures and placing your defenses, the game has many bugs that make the game a lot less interesting to play. The menus look very basic and they work very badly as well. In the inventory menu, there are several buttons to use commands like locking equipment to protect them when selling all your other items, equip them, sort your items and some others, these buttons need to be clicked more than once for them to even function and you would need to click them exactly in the middle for it to be a success. The game also notices a lot of double clicks while you’re only clicking once, which can result in many actions taking place you won’t even give a command for.
When switching to a controller for a better co-op experience, there are even more problems showing up. For starters, you can’t move the indicator to your equipped items to check if something is better or not. You can only interact with the items in your inventory and not more. Pressing a button that has no function here will result in the disappearance of any indication and the menu will freeze. You can only solve this by closing and reopening the menu. In controller mode, the buttons on the screen are replaced by the controller buttons. This would work fine if all these actions were really connected to these actions, but they’re not. Some buttons just won’t do the action they’re bound to. All in all, this game has a lot of flaws for a game that has been in development for so long and has gotten its official release.
Conclusion
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened feels like a game that’s far from done. The interface doesn’t work well and there are a lot of bugs of which some are even game-breaking and require you to restart the game in the midst of playing to fix it. The overall gameplay is quite good with the placing of towers and using your own powers against your enemies but that’s quite it. for the rest, the game is pretty bad and needs a lot of work for it to be a playable game that will grant you some fun and relaxation. The console versions of this game are said to release soon, so we hope that they’ve improved these versions or they will be completely unplayable from the start. At this point, we won’t recommend buying this game at all with a price that’s way too high for a game that’s far from done.
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[…] year, we took a look at the PC version of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, the latest entry in the Dungeon Defenders game series. We weren’t really pleased with the […]