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Review: Dungeon Runners

06.28.07 - 02:02pm

I have always been a very unique gamer, I actually appreciate unique and simple games. The going trend of online games either involves twisted and complicated MMOs that suck the life out of you, massive hour-long RTS matches, or twitch-based shooters that cause you to flinch whenever someone turns a corner and surprises you on campus. The general formulas for a successful game have been set in stone for years now and developers usually follow one of the trends and bank on some of the millions of gamers getting sucked in and dropping their hard earned cash. I have no problem paying for a decent blockbuster game as I did with Supreme Commander but sometimes I like a change of pace and I would like this change of pace to be free. NCSoft, the producers behind many popular MMOs has developed a game that is so simple but so unique that it honestly is able to entertain me for an hour or so and I don’t feel cheated. Dungeon Runners takes Blizzard’s Diablo-series formula of a hack and slash slaughterfest combined with a 3D filled with enough humor and irony to make even the most hardened player giggle like a little school girl. The humor found within the game ranges from pop-culture references to obscure references to current-era news. Prepare to be entertained, NCSoft has a winner here.

You aren’t an MMO player if you haven’t played Diablo or Diablo 2. I had Diablo on both Playstation and PC and I had Diablo 2 and it’s expansion on PC, these games alone account for at least a good combined year of my lifetime. Diablo was based on a rather simple concept, you create a character, equip a weapon or two and some armor, grab a fistful of potions, and then dive into your neighborhood crypt/dungeon/forest/gate to hell and slay yourself some demons. The mindless point/slash drive behind Diablo made it wildly popular and the playback effect of this game was immense with randomly generated content constantly available to the user. Now this isn’t a review of Diablo but Dungeon Runners owes a lot of its fans and drive from Diablo and you’ll see why very soon. To start the concept is very simple, you once again create a character, equip a few weapons and some armor, grab a backpack full of potions(ooh! a difference!), and then dive into your neighborhood Terror Dome, Cavernous Cave of Caverns, or Horrific Dungeon of Legend. Cavernous Cave of Caverns you say? Yeah, it gets even better.

Characters and Classes

Traditionally you choose a specific class that’ll determine your role on the battlefield and amongst your group. Typically this class would bring with it a slew of strengths and weaknesses, for example lets highlight the paladin which is by far one of my favorite classes. The paladin traditionally wears the heaviest of armors, wields the strongest of weapons, and in general is a beef cake capable of soaking up tons of damage in order to keep the softer/weaker characters safe. The only problem is they are generally very slow in moving and attacking and ranged enemies easily take them out. Well in Dungeon Runners you can easily make a paladin-styled character but guess what, you can equip him with a Fireball spell to take out those pesky archers. Don’t like running slower than a drunkard falling up a flight of steps? Fine just equip yourself with a few movement speed buffs and voila, you have your trackstar beefcake paladin of ranged destruction. While you originally choose a class that is either mage, warrior, or ranger, it is so easy to cross between classes, meld them together, and smash all three together. The saying “Jack of all Trades, Master of None” definitely doesn’t apply to this game, you can literally do anything you want and be successful.

Skills and Attributes

Your character will have your standard attributes like strength, agility, intelligence, and endurance and they do the standard job in any RPG but that is the end of the similarities between Dungeon Runners and all other RPGs. Lets say you started out as a mage, incredibly intelligent but more fragile than porcelain vase on a 10 foot pedestal. Getting tired of being creamed in every fight? Fine, just respec your character for a small fee and turn yourself into the beefiest tank with enough health to brave the deepest of dungeons. For a minor gold fee you can respec your character as many times as you want, I myself have done it about a dozen times in a dozen levels as I get bored with one build and create another. What this lets people do is develop a single character with the ability to be anything, rather than having to develop a small army of different characters.

Skills and spells are available to anyone with three major tracks available, magic, ranged, and melee. There is no penalty to learning every skill available however it could get to be a bit expensive. Your skills will primarily effect your role in combat and how you will go about destroying the forces of evil. Rather than focusing on a single skill set it pays well to diversify yourself so you can overcome any obstacle. I myself prefer a mix between the magic and melee skills with a dabble of ranged skills for kicks. You can build your character however you want but you’ll be restricted to using only 10 skills at one time. These will include your passive and active buffs along with all your offensive skills. This limitation is an excellent idea as it keeps users from becoming too powerful, if you could access all your skills at one time then you could just chain then back to back and be TOO effective. At times some of the most important decisions will occur when you decide which skills to bring readily equipped.

Economy

The entire economy is based on gold coins, which unlike Diablo 2 actually carry some weight. Gold cannot be traded between players as this will deter gold farmers however gold can be spent on skills and they get to be very expensive. Gold is also used to respec your character and in the near future gold will be used to purchase King Coins which I’ll discuss in a bit. In general your loot will be sold to pay for your potions and to pay for your skills. Trading between players will be implemented in the next build but from what I’ve been told this will only include secure item trading, no gold will ever change hands. Currently individuals can only drop-trade which results in lots of people being scammed, no good for honest players but very good for scammers.

Membership

Anyone can play Dungeon Runners, it seriously costs you $0 out of pocket to play this game but there is an issue with this. Servers and dev teams don’t work for free so NCSoft has to make money somehow and they do this through memberships. Just like most other MMOs, Dungeon Runners charges $5/month for a “membership” which gives you elevated status within the game and enables many features that are otherwise unavailable. Most notably is equipment, there are 6 grades of items that are most easily distinguished by their item colors. White items have no magical attributes, green items have weak attributes, blue have slightly stronger attributes, gold are even better, purple is damn good, and rainbow items are god-like. Only members are able to use gold, purple, and rainbow items which give them somewhere between a 10 second and 15 second head start if Dungeon Runners was a quarter-mile drag strip. I played with a free account for about 5 hours and got sick of being sub-par, I wanted to bash monsters with no fear for my own skin. After dropping the $5 for a month of play I have to say it is completely worth it. Compared to free accounts my equipment easily makes my character excel in what I decide to focus on, I don’t have to worry about scrounging around the middle and lower tier armors to keep myself safe and secure. King Coins, those tokens I mentioned earlier are also only useful to members. Why you might ask? Well..

King Coins

These coins add another level to the economy of Dungeon Runners above the gold economy. While gold can guy you a few bits of armor and weapons, in general these items absolutely suck compared to what you will find in your adventures into the dungeons. King Coins on the other hand can be exchanged at special vendors for random purple and rare rainbow drops.Since these items can only be used by members this alienates non-members but that’s the purpose, it’s another perk. Asides from the normal King Coin vendors there is a special vendor named Sam that appears at random on 4th and 7th levels of dungeons that will charge a higher fee but drop better items. King Coins themselves are acquired through questing and through rare drops in the dungeons.

Quests

Since the current content is rather sparse I wasn’t concerned about the quests and frankly they get a bit repetitive by level 20 but no matter, they are a fast source of gold and Coins in the early-game. Generally you are required to kill X amount of one critter, kill a major boss, or collect random objects like Singing Swords, Fish, and Fizzes. I hear that the devs are working on creating more quests for users but frankly I get bored questing as it involves running all over the place, I’d rather just hop into a dungeon, slay a few dozen critters, sell my loot, and log out. Those of you looking for a dense quest system with hour-long quests and great rewards had better look elsewhere, what did you think this was WoW?

Replay Value

Normally I wouldn’t address this issue as most games have a set amount of replays before they just get boring. Dungeon Runners is a very simple game which requires maybe 3 braincells to play. With completely random generated maps and item drops the game is always interesting as you find yourself constantly exploring new territory and new items. Since there can only be so many item combinations you’ll find duplicates from time to time but the item names are so classic that you’ll keep smiling. For $5 I can easily see myself logging maybe 40-50 hours before I get bored with this game and I’m a very finicky gamer who jumps from game to game faster than the Internet adopts a new meme so that in itself can attest to the value held within this game. With promised monthly updates to the game and new features being introduces with each new build Dungeon Runners should continue to impress new and old players alike.

Take note of the floating chicken drumstick next to my character. Yeah, this game has it all =)

Grouping

Honestly you could play through this entire game by yourself if you wanted. Every zone within the game asides from the common areas (towns and such) are instanced for each “group” be it a single player or five. I myself solo’d the first twenty levels rather swiftly however I started grouping as the loot and experience was much better in a group as the monsters were worth more. Grouping is rather painless and can either be accomplished through invite or the automatic “look for group” function. Since you aren’t directly influenced by your groupmates it is nice to group since you can gain much for very little risk. Death in itself is a trivial matter of respawning with 50% hp, nothing a potion won’t fix. The best part of grouping is getting a small group of friends that like to “farm” a specific boss over and over again, I myself have a few players that I routinely group with as we all know each other and how everyone plays. Grouping isn’t as necessary as other MMORPGs but it’s a fun aspect so I suggest checking it out if only for the loot/XP bonus.

Humor

Oh.. where to start. Dungeon Runners is by far not a serious game. I’d like to say take the humor of Serious Sam and smash it together with Diablo and that’s what you have but that doesn’t quite cover it. Level names usually are either funny in their descriptions, hint at popular issues, or have some other theme that is funny in itself. The rumor of a level filled with just lawyers is great, imagine getting to slap your way through a room of lawyers with a fresh mountain trout as a weapon? In Dungeon Runners that could very easily happen. I think a few item names would do the trick to show exactly what type of humor we are talking about here.

• Airborne Designer Beads of the Dodo
• Jarring Rough Crystal Plate of the Stoic Ant
• Smashin’ Robust Helm of the Nimble Tigon
• Pure Dragon Bone Ring of the Jackalope
• Ymmot’s Dimensional Hammer of the Combative Snapper
• Eager Killer Threads of the Lucky Unicorn
• Overachieving Lollipop Ring of the Heretic Sasquatch
• Cosmic Decoder Ring of the Sectarian Crocodile
• Sphincter’s People’s Pick of the Fireproof Taint
• Stone Giant Club of the Bunny
Thrashin’ Tank Gauntlets of the Frostbitten Liger
• Heroic Wrapped Mu’umu’u of the Armadillo

Pizza Cutter: check, Pizza?

Conclusion

If the item names alone don’t make you want to play then I hope the lure of a free MMO with simple gameplay will draw you in for a few hours of play. I myself will probably play this game for a few more game hours before dropping it for something new but it sure did entertain me for two weeks straight. The game doesn’t have the depth of a true MMORPG or the variety of Diablo 2 but it combines the dashing good looks of modern MMO’s with the simple fare of Diablo 2 to create a simple but amazing combination that is both easy to play and very rewarding. Now I just need to find a way to sell my account and turn a profit, maybe I can get a few bucks on top of my $5 investment? For doing what it sets out to do and accomplishing it with a wacky style I’d give Dungeon Runners a 8.5 out of 10. Much will improve with the new build in July and this score could only go up, PVP will help immensely.

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