Developer: Soldak Entertainment
Publisher: Soldak Entertainment
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Din’s Champion – Review
After a lengthy Early Access period, Din’s Champion has arrived in full. The game is the latest entry in Soldak Entertainment’s multi-genre spanning fantasy universe, following 2010’s Din’s Curse and 2019’s Din’s Legacy. Now, although one of our fellow writers tackled the latter, for your humble reviewer, the Terraria-like Din’s Champion was the first foray into the world of Din. As such, we’ll be looking at the game as a standalone title, since we’re not entirely up to date on our lore. So, how does Din’s Champion fare?
Story
Set in the world of Aleria, Din’s Champion tells the tale of a war between the goddess Valta and the god Din. Valta seeks to raze Aleria and rebuild it in her dark image. As the chosen champion of Din, you step in to halt her destruction. The task at hand may sound simple in theory, but in practice it is anything but so. You’ll need to make your way across Aleria’s different regions, where the story unfolds through dynamically evolving crises, world events and quests issued by randomised regional nemeses and NPCs. The divine war serves as the overarching premise for a dynamic regional structure, resulting in a non-linear narrative. Although this approach does mean that there isn’t a whole lot of room for narrative depth, it also means that no two playthroughs will play out in the exact same way. It’s also worth noting that most of that same backstory isn’t handed to you on a silver platter in-game, and we had to piece together context from the game’s Steam description and what little in-game info was spoon-fed to us.
Graphics
The classic 2D side-scrolling visuals are the first aspect of Din’s Champion to bring to mind Terraria, but as you’ll see when we get to the gameplay, the similarities don’t end there. If we were to outright compare the newer game to Re-Logic’s classic title, then Terraria definitely comes out on top. Din’s Champion simply looks plain and outdated. This is in part due to the world’s biomes being procedurally generated rather than designed by hand. Foreground and background elements in the layered 2D environments can occasionally be difficult to distinguish. The game’s UI is cluttered and readability of text is often hard as a result. Character and enemy animations are basic, janky, and stiff. To make matters worse, the game’s visual performance simply isn’t up to snuff either, with inconsistent frame rates, UI bugs and general visual clunkiness.
Sound
Like its visuals, Din’s Champion’s soundscape doesn’t quite deliver. Music is present but quite forgettable, and voice acting is very limited, although we were kind of surprised to hear an enemy declare that he had stolen our gold. The most notable feature about Din’s Champion’s audio is perhaps how the game features persistent audio cues for major gameplay occurrences, such as a distinct, repetitive alarm that triggers during town attacks. Other than that, ambience and sound effects are functional but not otherwise noteworthy.
Gameplay
With a title like Din’s Champion and a premise involving a literal war between deities, we almost expected an action-packed title akin to Dark Souls or Elden Ring. That’s not what we got. While there is combat in the game (and we’ll get to that), the main focus is on digging and mining for resources, crafting equipment, and building and expanding your town base. To Din’s Champion’s credit, the game handles these aspects exceptionally well. Terrain is fully interactive with destructible blocks, fluid physics and spontaneous Cataclysm events that reshape the landscape even without your direct input. A robust class system lets you pick and mix from dozens of starting classes with expansive skill trees and the ability to combine up to three classes per character. This ties into the game’s extensive crafting system, where you can create items across specialized stations and modify them through socketing and enchanting.
By comparison, combat is a shallow affair, relying on standard hack-and-slash action with weapon attacks and cooldown abilities as you make your way through Din’s Champion’s side-scrolling platforming segments. Exploring Aleria involves making your way through different overworld biomes and underground caverns to gather resources and complete quests. As you might expect, these areas are infested with enemies. Killing them is how you level up, so you can’t exactly ignore them, as much as we would’ve wanted. If Din’s Champion had completely focused on its world simulation mechanics, it probably would have been a much better game. Unfortunately, the undercooked combat and janky platforming mechanics drag down the experience as a whole. It doesn’t help that the game’s tutorials are lacking, to say the least. We often felt confused, not because of what we had to do, as the on-screen prompts tell you, but because of why you had to do certain things.
That’s not to say that Din’s Champion doesn’t have potential at all. The game’s unpredictable world simulation is nothing short of fantastic, with dynamic events, evolving quests and those aforementioned region-altering Cataclysms. The game has an unprecedented replay value for the genre too, thanks to that random map generation and over 50.000 (yes, really!) class/skill combinations. The campaign is highly customisable too, and we’re not just talking about cranking up the difficulty. There are options for permadeath as well as vitality penalties. This is the kind of game that gives you a lot of freedom to shape it to fit your playstyle, even reducing the amount of combat encounters, though an option to get rid of platforming altogether is missing. Still, for a mere €19.50, you’re getting a good little game here, even if it doesn’t entirely live up to that potential.
Conclusion
A surprisingly deep crafting loop and impressively dynamic living sandbox world make Din’s Champion a game that is well worth checking out if you’re a fan of games like Terraria. While the game’s replay value and character build customisation reach elite levels, the game’s overall appeal is tempered by its lack of visual polish, awkward 2D platforming, and basic combat mechanics, though.
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