Dungeon Defenders is a game about, well, defending parts of your castle from invading monsters, be it the dungeon or the throne room. The game shapes up as one part tower defense, one part RPG, two parts explosions.
The tower defense isn't entirely what some may be used to if you come from the Warcraft/Starcraft Custom Game crowd. Towers aren't invulnerable, nor can you maze with them, instead, walling is encouraged, because the enemies can kill not only your towers but you as well.
Your selection of towers is limited to five per character, and each unlocks as you level that character up. The mage for example starts off with a "Magic Missile," tower, then quickly unlocks magical barriers to erect to prevent enemies from moving forward. Afterwards he unlocks a splash fireball tower, a chain lightning tower, and finally everyone's favorite tower. You know what I mean, that one that is in every tower defense ever that has enough range to give a sniper a run for their money and enough damage to put a head-on collision between two trains to shame but takes three years to reload? Yeah that one!
The cool thing is, is that between waves you can switch to being any of your characters that you've leveled up in order to place their towers. This gives my mage for example, access to a much more powerful blocking tower courtesy of the knight, the "Spiked Barrier," which has more health, covers slightly more area, and deals damage when enemies walk into it or try to attack it in melee. I can also switch to the monk character who specializes in placeable buff/debuff auras that take up no space and cannot be attacked by enemies, but therefore can't block enemies.
In addition to the tower defense elements of the game come the RPG elements. You play as a hero who can develop their fighting prowess and take on monsters themselves, collecting loot like it's Hurricane Katrina all over again and frantically placing towers to prevent the monsters from destroying your precious crystal. The loot system is great. Rather than being a simple prefix/suffix system with varying levels of rarity, the game opts to give you items that have the potential for greatness. For example, being a tower specialized mage, I found a helmet that gave me +1 to the "tower attack speed," stat. I then proceeded to spend my hard earned mana (excess mana is used as currency) to make that helmet give me +6 tower attack speed, worth 2-3 level ups of power at least.
The game suffers from one major problem in my opinion. Given that the game is a tower defense, and that your character can't be everywhere at once, it seems rather pointless to put points into making your character more powerful. That being said, when you level up you can improve stats that buff your character, or improve stats that buff your towers. It's not like they gave you say, 1 personal skill point and 1 tower skill point, you're free to put those points wherever you want, and at no time have I felt like I would have been making a smart choice putting points into my hero's personal power with the exception of one stat that increases channeling speed, so that I can summon towers faster or repair them faster.
Why make my attack hit for more damage when I can make 20 towers hit for more damage, especially when they all do way more damage than me per hit to begin with?
That little nagging point aside, the game looks spectacular for a game that was originally for the iPhone. The cel-shaded graphics look fairly crisp during the high-action, and the particle effects don't fall short either.
Without further adieu, here's some of the mage gameplay! Also, Ding 20!
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