Those who haven’t played the game that Dungeon Runners originated in will be instantly name it a rip-off of World of Warcraft. But looking further back, what we have is actually a clone of Diablo.
Dungeon Runners is made to please to the casual gamer and all those who are new to the MMO scene. It’s fairly easy to level up, and the game offers several difficulty settings to tailor your dungeon crawling adventures to your gaming expertise. If you die you are conveniently placed in town at the obelisk, which is a portal that can take you to any town you have visited before, as well as the last place you teleported from. Your mana and health also regenerate automatically when you aren’t fighting, so if you need to, you can always run away or regain some HP… but things will still be chasing you.
The game is free to download and free to play. There are added features for a $4.99 monthly fee, such as being able to carry stackable potions and equipping a series of equipment and weapons with really nice stats. Unfortunately – and I actually thought the membership would have increased it – the inventory space is pretty limited, especially when you are playing on the highest difficulty setting and keep getting all sorts of loot drops. Fortunately, travelling back and forth is easy and quick enough, and you do get access to the bank where you can store some items.
Last but not least, while there are four or five game worlds, sometimes you might find them full. If that is the case, members will have priority logging on over non-paying players.
Players can raid dungeons on their own, but the game has specific features to make grouping easier (including voice chat), and to get to your group quicker. We found out that using the “go to” command would take you to the other party member automatically, even across zones. What a way to save on teleporting scrolls!
The game is packed with quests, many of them repeatable. Your reward is usually gold and sometimes a King’s Coin (which you use to trade in for armor tailored to your class). However, it would have been nice to receive items or experience as quest rewards now and again.
At first, I thought the slaughter quests weren’t really adding up, since I kept clearing the dungeon before I had the amount needed to get my reward. Then found out logging out and back in would respawn the dungeons, so that fixed the problem. However, when you come back to the world in whatever dungeon floor, the map will be reset and you have to explore it all over again.
I also would have enjoyed having more than only one character to play as without having to make separate accounts. Although there aren’t may character customization options available in the creation process, there is plenty of armor and weapons to make your avatar stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, even though you pick one of the three base classes, you can customize your character’s abilities by purchasing skills from all three trainers. It’s up to you to find out what you want to do and how you want to play.
Lets talk about Passive Skills. You figure “passive” means you learn it and automatically have it, right? Wrong. You get a limited number of hotkeys where you drag and drop certain skills you have learned but Dungeon Runners makes you waste hotkey slots by forcing you to place your Passive Skills there, otherwise you don’t get their benefits.
Although the game seemed to run just fine on Windows Vista for a while, we soon found out that wasn’t the case. My husband crashed every other minute and it became impossible for us to play together. While we were both running on Vista, the laptop seemed to handle it fine and I had no problems aside from some lag now and again. My husband’s desktop (a powerhouse) wouldn’t keep him connected for more than 5 minutes at a time after we got to the second dungeon. Tech support told us the game doesn’t support this particular OS, so tough luck for us – and apparently, for whoever else is planning to play it on Vista.
What annoyed me the most was the way the weapons and pieces of armor were named. It seems like it’s all on a randomizer and bunches up a handful or words together to create ridiculous names such as my Multifarious Amethyst Plate of the Simple Tarantula. The speed rates on the weapons should also show DPS, instead of just classifying it as Grandma, Ludicrous or Freakin’ Fast. It just seemed totally out of place. Also inappropriate most of the time were the NPCs voices, some of them really made me want to be able to attack them.
Dungeon Runners is the MMO for the casual gamer. You can log on, hack and slash for a few minutes and log off, or you can keep going at it for hours. It’s easy to get into, the controls can be summed up in point and click, and the membership features cost a lot less than any other MMO out there.
Still, I found my share of things to complain about, but there is plenty of room for improvement. However, I’d advise Windows Vista users not to invest in it until there’s a patch to solve the compatibility issues.