I'm a big fan of the Diablo series. I still fondly remember playing co-op Diablo with my high-level Chain Lightning Sorcerer. He could wipe out entire screens full of monsters (as well as any Warriors in his party who had the misfortune of being in his way) with a single click of the mouse. And somehow that just never got old.
Fast forward ten years or so and we have Dungeon Hunter by Gameloft, which is essentially Diablo II (minus a few features) for the iPhone. You play as a resurrected king who was killed by his wife just after he resurrected her from her death on their wedding day. Yeah.
Fortunately the plot isn't the main attraction here. Indeed, aside from an uncharacteristically serious (and quite well made) introductory cinematic, almost all of the dialogue in the game is written in a self-mocking, tongue-in-cheek tone that lets you know that this story shouldn't be taken too seriously. That's fine with me, though I do think it strange that the game kicks off on a serious note only to turn silly five minutes later and then stay silly for the rest of the game. Why didn't the game start as it meant to go on? Whatever. Let's just kill some stuff. Violently.
Let me say up front that I really like this game and would heartily recommend it to anyone who likes Diablo-type hack-n-slash RPGs, especially if they have a 3GS or an equivalent iPod Touch. The graphics and animations are excellent, the environments are varied and well realised, the gameplay is solid and great fun, the music and sounds are superb throughout, the inventory and skill screens make great use of the available screen space. It's not perfect, as I'll explain, but it's definitely very good. I've played it all the way through several times and I'm still enjoying it.
At the start of the game you get to choose whether your character is a Warrior, Rogue, or Mage. Each character class has its own unique set of skills into which you can put "skill points" (one of which is earned each time you level up) with the better skills having higher level requirements. Levelling up also gives you points to put into your any of your four attributes. Strength is mainly for the Warrior; it affects melee damage and allows the use of better heavy armour and heavy weapons. Dexterity is the favoured attribute of the Rogue; it improves your skill in combat and allows the use of better light armour and light weapons. Energy is the choice attribute for a Mage; it increases your total mana (which gets used up whenever any character uses a skill, and regenerates over time) and allows the use of better Mage gear like magical robes, wands, and staves. A fourth attribute, Endurance, gives you more health and improves things like your ability to block, but is not a part of any equipment requirements. No matter what class you are, you can put points into whatever attribute you wish. Want a Warrior who is agile and wears light armour? No problem, juts pile your attribute points into Dexterity.
There is no shortage of equipment, and that's just as well because Dungeon Hunter is a very equipment-driven RPG, meaning that the gear you wear has more of an impact on your effectiveness than where you put your skill points. Almost every monster you kill drops weapons and armour that you can pick up and use straight away, provided you meet the requirements, or otherwise save for later use in your almost-but-not-quite-bottomless inventory. Many items have a random number of randomly generated magical properties, and are colour coded to let you know how many magical effects they have. Potions are dropped as well (or can be purchased in towns) and these can be drunk during combat, with a single tap, to restore your health and mana to full. And you can carry up to twelve of them! It's all very, very Diablo II. Even the music sounds just like the music from Diablo II.
So far so familiar, but if you're well versed in RPG tropes then you may be slightly surprised by how each of the classes actually plays. The Rogue specialises in daggers, not bows (there are no ranged weapons in Dungeon Hunter), which means he actually plays rather like an archetypal Warrior. This problem is exacerbated by a couple of buggy Rogue skills (details later) which, had they worked, would have allowed a little variation in the way the Rogue can be played. Then there's the Mage who, oddly, does not have any damage-dealing AOE spells apart from the Fairy spells that all three character classes get. However, the Mage can hurl his fireballs and lighting bolts at individual enemies from a distance, which makes him the only ranged (i.e. classically Rogue-like) character in the game. And finally there's the Warrior, who possesses the only damage-dealing AOE skill in the game, which completes the circle by making him almost Mage-like. I don't mind that Gameloft have mixed things up a bit, but it's mildly annoying that they've used the names of well establish archetypical character classes when they don't really play like the archetypes.
A much more serious problem is the buggy skills I mentioned. The Mage has a spell that doesn't target properly; the Warrior has a spell (yes, a spell) that also doesn't target properly; and the Rogue... well, the Rogue is just a mess. He has a sneak skill which turns him invisible, which is useless on its own, but then there's a another skill that's supposed to give him sneak attack damage. Unfortunately it just doesn't work. You can sink as many points into this skill as you like and you won't get any sneak attack damage at all, which renders both skills useless, and any points you've put into them are irretrievably wasted. And it doesn't end there. The Rogue also has a twin strike skill which is supposed to hit two targets simultaneously, but it doesn't actually hit anything at all. He has a jump attack skill which is supposed to slow targets down but it doesn't. Last but not least he has a high-level skill that lets him throw daggers, but it has the same targetting problem as the aforementioned buggy Warrior and Mage skills. Really, one gets the feeling that the Rogue just wasn't play tested at all. The other 38 skills in the game all work just fine, so these problems are not quite game-breaking (at least not for a Warrior or Mage) but it's pretty sloppy work nonetheless.
There are other areas, too, where the game lacks polish. The framerate in some of the more graphically demanding locations is a particular problem if you play the game on anything less than a 3GS. Occasionally, during combat, my 3G would slow to a slideshow, sometimes even freezing for a second, at which point I had little choice but to pray I was still alive when it unfroze. It didn't happen often enough to ruin the game for me, but it's very annoying when it does happen.
The controls could also be improved. The game gives you the option of using either a virtual stick or a tap-to-go-there mechanic for movement, but both are problematic. The virtual stick is arguably the better method, but it's not an analogue stick. You have two speeds, stop and sprint, so pushing the virtual stick halfway doesn't result in walking. The virtual stick also requires you to press in the middle before sliding your finger in a direction, which is rather annoying - why can't I just put my finger directly on the outer ring to move in a particular direction?
My remaining complaints are not so much about what's in the game as what's not in it. There are no randomly generated dungeons here, which is a real shame and something I hope to see in future Diablo clones on the iPhone. The variety of monsters is somewhat limited and you'll only ever face one kind of elemental foe at a time, so for example you get a fire level and then an earth level, then an air level and then a water level, then back to fire again, and so on. I appreciate that iPhone developers have to work with tight memory constraints but it would have been nice, and certainly possible, to mix things up a little bit. It also would have made the gameplay that much more interesting having to deal with multiple magical elements at once instead of just one at a time.
All in all this is a great game and well worth the price, especially given the replay value you get from having three character classes (even if one of them is a bit broken). But there's also a lot of room for improvement, and I don't doubt that sometime soon Dungeon Hunter will be dethroned by a better iPhone Diablo clone... possibly made by Blizzard themselves? We can but hope.
Fast forward ten years or so and we have Dungeon Hunter by Gameloft, which is essentially Diablo II (minus a few features) for the iPhone. You play as a resurrected king who was killed by his wife just after he resurrected her from her death on their wedding day. Yeah.
Fortunately the plot isn't the main attraction here. Indeed, aside from an uncharacteristically serious (and quite well made) introductory cinematic, almost all of the dialogue in the game is written in a self-mocking, tongue-in-cheek tone that lets you know that this story shouldn't be taken too seriously. That's fine with me, though I do think it strange that the game kicks off on a serious note only to turn silly five minutes later and then stay silly for the rest of the game. Why didn't the game start as it meant to go on? Whatever. Let's just kill some stuff. Violently.
Let me say up front that I really like this game and would heartily recommend it to anyone who likes Diablo-type hack-n-slash RPGs, especially if they have a 3GS or an equivalent iPod Touch. The graphics and animations are excellent, the environments are varied and well realised, the gameplay is solid and great fun, the music and sounds are superb throughout, the inventory and skill screens make great use of the available screen space. It's not perfect, as I'll explain, but it's definitely very good. I've played it all the way through several times and I'm still enjoying it.
At the start of the game you get to choose whether your character is a Warrior, Rogue, or Mage. Each character class has its own unique set of skills into which you can put "skill points" (one of which is earned each time you level up) with the better skills having higher level requirements. Levelling up also gives you points to put into your any of your four attributes. Strength is mainly for the Warrior; it affects melee damage and allows the use of better heavy armour and heavy weapons. Dexterity is the favoured attribute of the Rogue; it improves your skill in combat and allows the use of better light armour and light weapons. Energy is the choice attribute for a Mage; it increases your total mana (which gets used up whenever any character uses a skill, and regenerates over time) and allows the use of better Mage gear like magical robes, wands, and staves. A fourth attribute, Endurance, gives you more health and improves things like your ability to block, but is not a part of any equipment requirements. No matter what class you are, you can put points into whatever attribute you wish. Want a Warrior who is agile and wears light armour? No problem, juts pile your attribute points into Dexterity.
There is no shortage of equipment, and that's just as well because Dungeon Hunter is a very equipment-driven RPG, meaning that the gear you wear has more of an impact on your effectiveness than where you put your skill points. Almost every monster you kill drops weapons and armour that you can pick up and use straight away, provided you meet the requirements, or otherwise save for later use in your almost-but-not-quite-bottomless inventory. Many items have a random number of randomly generated magical properties, and are colour coded to let you know how many magical effects they have. Potions are dropped as well (or can be purchased in towns) and these can be drunk during combat, with a single tap, to restore your health and mana to full. And you can carry up to twelve of them! It's all very, very Diablo II. Even the music sounds just like the music from Diablo II.
So far so familiar, but if you're well versed in RPG tropes then you may be slightly surprised by how each of the classes actually plays. The Rogue specialises in daggers, not bows (there are no ranged weapons in Dungeon Hunter), which means he actually plays rather like an archetypal Warrior. This problem is exacerbated by a couple of buggy Rogue skills (details later) which, had they worked, would have allowed a little variation in the way the Rogue can be played. Then there's the Mage who, oddly, does not have any damage-dealing AOE spells apart from the Fairy spells that all three character classes get. However, the Mage can hurl his fireballs and lighting bolts at individual enemies from a distance, which makes him the only ranged (i.e. classically Rogue-like) character in the game. And finally there's the Warrior, who possesses the only damage-dealing AOE skill in the game, which completes the circle by making him almost Mage-like. I don't mind that Gameloft have mixed things up a bit, but it's mildly annoying that they've used the names of well establish archetypical character classes when they don't really play like the archetypes.
A much more serious problem is the buggy skills I mentioned. The Mage has a spell that doesn't target properly; the Warrior has a spell (yes, a spell) that also doesn't target properly; and the Rogue... well, the Rogue is just a mess. He has a sneak skill which turns him invisible, which is useless on its own, but then there's a another skill that's supposed to give him sneak attack damage. Unfortunately it just doesn't work. You can sink as many points into this skill as you like and you won't get any sneak attack damage at all, which renders both skills useless, and any points you've put into them are irretrievably wasted. And it doesn't end there. The Rogue also has a twin strike skill which is supposed to hit two targets simultaneously, but it doesn't actually hit anything at all. He has a jump attack skill which is supposed to slow targets down but it doesn't. Last but not least he has a high-level skill that lets him throw daggers, but it has the same targetting problem as the aforementioned buggy Warrior and Mage skills. Really, one gets the feeling that the Rogue just wasn't play tested at all. The other 38 skills in the game all work just fine, so these problems are not quite game-breaking (at least not for a Warrior or Mage) but it's pretty sloppy work nonetheless.
There are other areas, too, where the game lacks polish. The framerate in some of the more graphically demanding locations is a particular problem if you play the game on anything less than a 3GS. Occasionally, during combat, my 3G would slow to a slideshow, sometimes even freezing for a second, at which point I had little choice but to pray I was still alive when it unfroze. It didn't happen often enough to ruin the game for me, but it's very annoying when it does happen.
The controls could also be improved. The game gives you the option of using either a virtual stick or a tap-to-go-there mechanic for movement, but both are problematic. The virtual stick is arguably the better method, but it's not an analogue stick. You have two speeds, stop and sprint, so pushing the virtual stick halfway doesn't result in walking. The virtual stick also requires you to press in the middle before sliding your finger in a direction, which is rather annoying - why can't I just put my finger directly on the outer ring to move in a particular direction?
My remaining complaints are not so much about what's in the game as what's not in it. There are no randomly generated dungeons here, which is a real shame and something I hope to see in future Diablo clones on the iPhone. The variety of monsters is somewhat limited and you'll only ever face one kind of elemental foe at a time, so for example you get a fire level and then an earth level, then an air level and then a water level, then back to fire again, and so on. I appreciate that iPhone developers have to work with tight memory constraints but it would have been nice, and certainly possible, to mix things up a little bit. It also would have made the gameplay that much more interesting having to deal with multiple magical elements at once instead of just one at a time.
All in all this is a great game and well worth the price, especially given the replay value you get from having three character classes (even if one of them is a bit broken). But there's also a lot of room for improvement, and I don't doubt that sometime soon Dungeon Hunter will be dethroned by a better iPhone Diablo clone... possibly made by Blizzard themselves? We can but hope.
