“Everythiii-ii-iiiiing in its right plaaaaa-aaaa-aaaace” sang Thom Yorke on the non-smash-hit record “Everything in its Right Place” back in 2000. Trendy Entertainment, notable enemies of Radiohead, have dismissed Yorke’s advice completely and if it was at all possible to put something in entirely the wrong place during the development of Dungeon Defenders, they’ve gone and done it.
The menus in the game are the most obvious sign of Trendy’s lack of consideration to the player, which runs all the way through Dungeon Defenders. Menu operations that should take three seconds take something more like thirty as the player is forced to look all over the screen for whatever they’re after, translate vague icons into meaningful messages, and then search for the button prompts that explain what they should press to perform the action they desire. All because the game has no logical pattern to such button presses.
Then the player will discover that they can’t actually do what they want because their character is standing in the wrong place so that particular menu function is missing entirely. It’s as if Radiohead wrote a song called “User Friendly” and Trendy went “SOD THAT.” Elsewhere in the menus the player will find options that create pop-ups which obscure other options making a huge part of the screen invisible, or options that are laid out so haphazardly that it takes ages just to work out which one you’re even highlighting.
That the game was originally made for mobile phones may explain some of this. The menus would be functional if a tap on the screen was all that was needed, but no effort at all seems to have been made in optimising the game for a console experience. While suggesting they go back to the drawing board would be a good start, it would probably be better if they chopped the old drawing board into bits, burnt it on a fire while a priest performed an exorcism, then scattered the ashes into the sea and bought a new drawing board completely.
It’s not just a terrible user-interface that’s been carried over from telephones, and the gameplay is dumbed down to the point of absolute tedium as a result.
There are two phases to Dungeon Defenders, building and combat.
The build phase is the less tedious half. Here, you use Mana to build various defences, which differ depending on the class of character you’ve chosen. They might be spiked walls, or cannon-like contraptions, all sorts of things. You’ll build them, then you’ll launch the enemies and lose track of the towers entirely because the maps are too big, too hard to navigate with the awful camera, and it’s impossible to keep on top of everything at once as enemies spawn from six different places. Of course, a weak tower set-up could be made up for in the combat phase, which moves the game from a tower-defence one into what people have referred to as an “action-RPG”. But that really does the entire action-RPG genre a disservice. It would be like referring to One Direction as a rock band because one of their songs probably has an instrument on it.
Here’s thirty seconds of gameplay footage from the combat phase of Dungeon Defenders, in text format:
RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT RT.
That is literally it. There’s no need to aim your attacks because on mobile phones that would be one command too many, and so that’s pointlessly carried over. Instead, the game just chooses a target for you. It goes all out in choosing the target too, and if you actually want to change or stop targeting that enemy, you have to run away a fair distance and approach the group of enemies again in the hope the game targets a better one for you this time. There’s really no more input requested of the player other than pressing, well, you know, RT.
There’s a suggestion that the game is better in co-op, but unfortunately, pressing RT over and over again while three other people are doing it doesn’t, in fact, make the gameplay any less mind-numbing. The biggest advantage to co-op is that you can turn the television over and watch Eastenders or something while someone else plays the level for you so that you don’t have to suffer it yourself. There’s also a suggestion that the game is more fun when a character reaches far higher levels. Punishing low level players for having the sheer nerve to be at low levels is about as poor as game design gets. If the game doesn’t start getting fun for twenty hours, why doesn’t the game begin where that twentieth hour is? There’s simply no excuse.
The one thing that would save the game was if it rewarded players, but it doesn’t even do this. If we offered you a toffee apple every time we kicked you in the shin, you might deal with that. Dungeon Defenders will only give you a sickly treat if it’s kicked you in the face eighty-thousand times first. People play games for that feeling that they’ve achieved something. Either specifically with an Achievement, or that obtaining a new item, a feeling we’re getting somewhere, that we’ve overcome some obstacle. The achievements in Dungeon Defenders are so grindy that it will take upwards of fifty hours to unlock a single one, unless you co-op with high level players and just get them to earn some on your behalf. The game constantly throws new items at the player in true loot-whore style, but every single one of them is completely useless. The best you can hope for is that you’ll gain a point or two to your attack or your defence, and it results in no discernible effect at all in the game. Even when you get a better item it takes ages to work out if it’s actually better as you encounter the menus again.
Weapons can be made more efficient by upgrading them using Mana that you store up, but this is so hard to come by in the (many) opening hours that it’s simply not an option whatsoever. As well as the slow rate of Mana gain, experience points come along equally slowly, making character development an absolute drag. Hilariously, in a move that requires a trollface.jpg bigger than the internet can even handle, Trendy remind the player that when playing solo, it’s possible to switch between all four character classes in the build phase to create a more varied defence. You can’t, however, share experience between them. If you want all your characters to play a role you have to play the game with each one for the hours and hours and hours and hours it takes to make them useful. Even when you do level up you suffer that same new-weapon syndrome, whereby the skill points you’re allowed to allocate have no noticeable effect on your character at all and it feels like you’re getting nowhere.
That’s because you really are getting nowhere.
There’s a kind of gamer that won’t mind that. The kind of gamer that can happily sit and perform menial tasks and get fat for hundreds of hours at a time in any MMORPG, obtaining pleasure from the simple fact that a stat that was a one before is now a two. They don’t need to feel development because seeing higher numbers is enough for them.
For anyone that needs more than that, there’s really no worse game in the world than Dungeon Defenders. It demands a massive investment of time from the player to get anywhere, and offers so little in return that it’s just not worth making that investment when there are so many better uses of that time. Like kicking people in their shins.