Player Preview - Dungeon Defenders 2

Title: Dungeon Defenders 2
Developer: Trendy Entertainment
Status: Open Alpha

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1kX02ao
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1kWZZLK

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the Co-Op action tower defence game, Dungeon Defenders 2, developed by Trendy Entertainment there 2^nd major PC release after the original. Dungeon Defenders 2 has you and 3 others defending the kingdom against an onslaught of various enemies and bad guys that have just recently been freed from their prison inside gems. In your arsenal to push back the waves you have 4 towers at your disposal along with 4 abilities and offcourse an auto attack to thin out the masses.

The maps that you’ll be setting up your defences consist of 3 or more lanes with differing units and amounts coming down each one. For the early maps holding off 3 lanes as a team of 4 is pretty easy, able to get around 3 or 4 turrets and structures in each lane from wave 1. The later maps however provide extremely tricky situations with some having 6 different lanes that need to be defended spreading your defences thin not to mention that there are side objectives that need to be defended that if they are destroyed, open up even more lanes for enemies to spawn from and travel down. For the last wave of every new map you’ll be introduced to a new enemy as a more powerful boss form of itself that will head down the main lane and require focus fire from your team to defeat before it does any real damage to the objectives you’re trying to defend. These new enemies will then appear as a part of the usual waves in the later on levels only a little bit less powerful but still carrying over its special mechanics like dealing extra damage to defences or being able to soak up a ton of damage. To help you in your tower placement and lane focus the game does devote 1 of the lanes to be the lane that a majority of enemies or just the most powerful enemies will travel down. Simply holding down shift will show you the enemy spawn locations and how many enemies will be spawned from that point for the wave.

Dungeon Defenders 2 is a class based game providing 4 unique character classes to play as, each with their own unique towers, abilities, attacks and roles. These characters include a mage that focuses on damage and slowing enemies, a soldier that aims to get into the thick of it with taunts and increasing damage with each attack, a monk that buffs allies and their towers and finally an archer. As team composition is extremely important especially when you can load into a game that could have all monks for example, you can actually change your character anytime during a game, keeping any towers you placed beforehand. This feature actually also makes the game completely playable solo and for some people this may be there preferred method of getting through some of the earlier levels as if you are pubbing it there are players that like to spam all their turrets and placeables in excess filling the levels maximum defense structure limit, preventing you from placing any of your own turrets.

To increase you damage output there are also some environmental weapons you can use to help out if things do get a little bit dicey including things like ballista’s, arcane turrets and high pressure water that will deal high amounts of damage or just completely wipe out any enemies caught in the effect. You will have to take advantage of them in the later levels especially if you aren’t levelled and I imagine they will become invaluable assets in the harder difficulties. They are pretty easy to use as well, being activatable by simply hitting them with a projectile or going up to them and hitting E. Your character levels up in the game gaining skill points that you can put towards numerous different stats like tower damage, character health and a lot more. These skills can be upgraded to crazy amounts too with you earning only a couple skill points for every level up and skills able to be raised all the way up to 200 each. You also have equip able gear that will help you out with your base stats allowing you to build your character toward things like pure turret damage or build your character tanky, like the soldier, so you can go into the thick of it without getting instantly killed.

Equipment drops from enemies when they die as well as being obtainable from these end of game loot chests that will first randomly generate its contents rarity indicated by the colour on the front, then drops items and gold corresponding to that rarity grade. The item system in the game is one part of the game that does need a little bit more tweaking as you are continually inundated with items, exiting a game with around 20 or so new items most of which are downgrades. There’s even a hub world character that holds onto all the items that couldn’t fit in your 4, 16 slot bags. It kind of takes away from the excitement of getting a new item drop and becomes more of a hassle to go through each one looking for a possible upgrade. If you don’t want the cash from selling these items though and are just purely after upgrades you can set up your inventory bags to auto collect only certain rarities at the end of each wave however gold can buy some nice things back at the Tavern. 

Outside of the main game you have a bunch of merchants available to you via this Tavern that acts as a sort of hub world with other players running around doing their thing. The items that each of these different shops offer refreshes every so often so if you can’t find anything good the first time around it’s worth checking back later on plus it gives you something to spend all that extra gold on, the most important being character passive orbs that increase the effectiveness of your turrets with things like radius and damage increases as well as increasing your own stats with 8 slots available to fill once you unlock them all at higher levels. Other vendors available in the tavern to take note of are the hatchery that latter on will allow you to hatch a pet that will aid you on missions, attacking enemies and increasing your stats. There is also an equipment upgrade station that also unlocks later on in the game that allows you to upgrade your equipment to get as much out of them as possible.

Other features of the game include the ability to customize your characters look with multiple different outfits that can be mixed and matched but do cost real world money and is the main free to play cash shop purchasable. There are character lockboxes that randomly drop during missions that can be unlocked with keys, purchasable with Wyvern tokens that are obtainable by completing quests. Once unlocked you will receive a piece of the customizable outfits to use. You can have multiple characters running at the same time with enough character slots to have every class in the game plus some. If you want to play purely with people you know or perhaps even just on your own you can set-up a private lobby so that only people invited can join your group.

Altogether Dungeon Defenders 2 provided a somewhat middling experience with no real draw that had me wanting to play more. The difficulty is almost purely based on your statistics rather than any kind of skill or advanced strategies requiring you to grind out levels to deal the damage needed for certain missions. The solo experience for me was also a lot more fun as I could actually set-up various turrets in effective ways, taking advantage of certain effects and bonuses, I imagine this gets better though as you move up the difficulty ranking with players learning optimal turret positioning and cohesion between them all. If you’re after a casual wave based tower defence game that doesn’t require too much strategy or skill then Dungeon Defenders 2 may be of interest to you.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Dungeon Defenders 2. The game is currently in open alpha and will most likely be releasing sometime in 2016 but it is currently available to download for free on Steams Early Access. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.