the net raiders

When I first heard about this game, Dungeon Fighter Online, the way it was sold on the message board was, “Like Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara.” As many of you know, D&D SoM is one of my favorite hardcore side scrollers of all time. Taking all the great parts of an RPG and combining them with all the great parts of a side scrolling beat ‘em up. Hell, taking all the best parts of the pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons and making it a beat ‘em up. So when Dungeon Fighter Online was compared to the latter, I experienced euphoric bliss. Plus it would be free to boot. So when the chance for the open beta arose, I jumped at the opportunity. But what I experienced when I logged in was the complete opposite of overwhelming joy, paying homage to the saying; you get what you pay for… nothing.

Conceptually I would make love to this game…
Let’s start with the concept of Dungeon Fighter by Nexus. The idea is great. Six classes, side scrolling action with navigational elements in a dungeon once the area was cleared. For those who are unfamiliar with D&D SoM from the old school arcades, it works very much like Castle Crashers mixed with Guardian Heroes on Sega Saturn, but with a bit more depth like what you would expect from an MMO. Characters get the usual slots for items, and stats are allocated and skills are earned as levels increase. Everything is sprite based giving it a great 16-bit artistic feel to it. And like a mmo, you have to play to your characters strengths, making casting classes something to get used to the first couple of times you play. So from the get-go, on paper I was hooked.

Execution was a different story…
When I logged on to this game, I was immediately reminded of two things. 1) This was beta. 2) This game is set to run on a free-to-play platform. So in a beta, you can expect lag, un-finalized animations, quests that don’t really make sense…. you get the idea.

The graphics were the first thing to cheese me off. Okay, I am not talking about the 16-bit goodness. Good lord no. I love that style, and the way that this is executed was brilliant. But the problem was that you were stuck in a 640×480’ish style setting with no option to re-adjust the size. The result, on my 1920×1200 monitor caused my character to be larger than life with pixels the size of legos. This caused the UI to be unnecessarily big, which I thought for a 2-d side scrolling fighter, was just a little bit larger than it needed to be. I looked around the limited amount of options, but nothing was in there to adjust.

Now let’s talk about the controls. Oh god the controls. Way back when, my dad got our first 186 IBM machine, I played Double Dragon on a floppy disk and I had a joystick for player one. If a friend came over, well the poor unfortunate person got the privilege of using the keyboard. Using a keyboard in a beat ‘em up is hard enough as it is, but in DFO, the controls are sticky to top it off. Attacks happen a split second after they were inputted into the keyboard (perhaps from the lag?) the walk cycle is slow as hell, making it really hard to get away from enemies, and the patented “double dash” (that’s a tap-tap in the direction you want to go) barely worked. The skills on the UI, similar to WoW would execute with the usual 1 – 0 fashion, but cool downs in a side scroller just don’t work. Further more the animations lasted way to long and would get “stuck” toward the end (much like Phantasy Star Online… veterans will know what I am talking about). So if you went in for the kill and executed your amazing sword technique and missed, this left you completely open to an attack for about 1 – 2 seconds. Giving a close-quarters opponent plenty of time to set up and lay down a combo. This is guaranteed to piss off hard core veterans for the Final Fight or Street Fighter series.

Then there were the characters; or lack there of. The problem? Way too many Demon swordsmen. I blame this almost entirely him just being way to fricken cool. He is essentially a lone swordsman, with a possessed “demon” arm and a complete rip off of Sol Badguy from the Guilty Gear series. And don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that. The style is great. But when I started up a game with my Priest and went into a dungeon. I was 1 Priest for 4 Demon Swordsmen. And heading into town, nothing but demon hunters for as far as the eye could see, or at least for as far as my screen could span on the X-axis, which as I already explained in the graphics part of this review, not very far.

His [Demon Swordsman] coolness factor is through the roof, whether or not he is an amazing class to play I will find out, but this created a sickening unbalance of dungeon exploration for me. The Gunner would be a distant second, who actually seems to be a better class since he operates from a distance.

And I will finally end with the big one and a general MMO pet-peeve of mine. Nexus’ very own “Noob-o-Meter.” What is it? Wikipedia put it best, “a feature which punishes players who attempt to play through dungeons with players of a significantly lower level, unless the higher level player is the mentor of the lower-leveled player (a feature which was present in the Closed Beta version of the game, but which became shortly-thereafter mysteriously absent).”

So if you are a week into the game, and essentially light years ahead, there is no point in even bother to play with your buddy who just started, short of making a new character yourself short of the mentor system… or wait but they removed that. If this article could pick up sound, you would be hearing a slow golf clap right now.

Dungeon Fighter Online is like I said, worth every penny depending on how you want to look at it. Sure I just ripped into it for fun, but at the same time it’s free. Should I really be bitching so much about something that provides hours of entertainment for next to nothing? Perhaps not. But standing alone as a game, it is far from done, and maybe shouldn’t have even been released into the beta stages yet.