Reviewed: May 27, 2005
Reviewed by: John Bowlin
Publisher
DreamCatcher Interactive
Developer
Heuristic Park
Released: May 4, 2005
Genre: Action-RPG
Players: 8
ESRB: Teen
6
7
4
4
4.0
System Requirements
Recommended System
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Dungeon Lords is a fantasy action/RPG by D.W. Bradley, who is best known for his great work on the Wizardry series (5-7). Unfortunately Dungeon Lords doesn't live up to the greatness of Bradley's previous works, as you will soon find out. Bradley's last game was Wizards & Warriors in 2000, also by Heuristic Park, and like W&W, Dungeon Lords suffers as a game released into the public before it was ready.
Back in February we previewed Dungeon Lords, and at the time I was pretty impressed with the combat system and the character advancement system. Make no mistake, those parts of the game are very good. However, I did express some concern that the demo we'd been given wasn't very complete and as it turns out my concerns were pretty much spot on. Dungeon Lords was shipped about 4 or 5 months too early. This game doesn't feel bad. It just feels unfinished. What's there is fun but you can't help but feel that it could have been so much better.
The story is pretty standard fantasy fare, at least, what I saw of it before I got stuck and could no longer proceed in the game. You are a chosen one, some kind of hero as foretold in the stars, and it is your job to save the kingdom from an evil enemy. Your Lord Davenmor's kingdom is being attacked by the evil marauders of Lord Barrowgrim, who wants to marry Davenmor's daughter, only she's fled the kingdom as she loves another. The story is told through long conversations by NPC's where you click on key words and that tells a bit more of the story. Some of it is voice acted.
You begin the game, like so many other RPG games, by making a character. Character customization allows you to choose among a bunch of different races and a few starter classes, but you're not really locked into anything other than race because as you advance you can direct how you want to spend your advancement points on just about anything you want. The character advancement is very good, there's lots of options, although it is pretty apparent that a melee fighting-type character is far more viable than say an all-magic character, simply because you never run out of sword swings but spells are a precious resource. As such, I would recommend only using magic as a "backup" and make sure your character can do melee combat, which is what you'll do most of in this game.
The interface is pretty intuitive and you can press ? to get help if you need it. The key combinations are listed in the manual. You control the game with the mouse and WASD keys like a first person shooter. Attacking involves using the left mouse button plus a movement key to swing in a specific direction. Combat is pretty visceral, you see lots of splashes of blood and the action is in real time. DreamCatcher compares the combat of this game to a fighting game, but the animations and movements of the characters are not as precise as in something like Soul Calibur but you better have some twitch skills because it's certainly more action-oriented than your typical RPG fare.
Some notable missing features are the ability to customize the appearance of your character (there's buttons for it but they don't do anything, and it's mentioned in the manual). Also there is no mini-map and this is a pretty important omission since it's easy to get lost in the game. At least it does have a compass and there is a paper map of the outdoor lands provided in the box. But that won't help you so much in the depths of a dungeon. To save the game you hit esc and pick a slot. Over time you'll wish you had more save slots and it would be nice to be able to load from the save screen and not have to go back out to the main menu first. The quest journal is somewhat buggy and doesn't always show you what you need to be doing next or mark off quests that you have completed.
The skill advancement system is a highlight of the game. You gain experience from killing foes in combat, as per most RPG games on the computer. You get advancement points, which you can immediately spend, on skills or abilities. The skill "tree" requires that you buy up skills to a certain level before other skills are opened up. For example you have to buy up your Light Armor to a certain level before you are allowed to buy into Medium Armor. This gives you a lot of flexibility in how to develop a character. You can go with magical skills, or perhaps thieving is more your style, etc. Mix and match, and play the kind of character you want to play not limited by a pre-defined set of classes.
The monster AI is pretty good, by the way; so don't expect a cakewalk through the combat. There were some times when it seemed as dumb as a post, like the creature got stuck behind some stairs or something and let me just pick it off at range. But the enemies are at least smart enough to try and swarm you and make it where you can not move, and the ones with ranged attacks are smart enough to stay back and pummel you from a distance while their friends keep you busy at melee range.
In theory, at least, Dungeon Lords offers more than 90 different spells available using four distinct schools of magic. Each of the four schools has its own unique flavor and mechanic. The most traditional form of magic is Arcane, which has a lot of offensive spells such as hurling magical bolts of energy or balls of fire at your opponents. You find spell books while exploring and each book lets you cast that particular spell once, so you will save up these books and use them to cast spells. Books are usually found in crates or chests but if your goal is to be a straight arcane caster you're probably going to run out of ammo pretty darn quickly. You can buy them from the arcane magic vendor but you'll need a lot of cash for them.
The Celestial school of magic offers defensive, healing, buffing and etc. spells. You use crystals to cast these spells. You can find the crystals in the dungeons or buy them. The crystals recharge after using them over time so you may have to wait until your crystals recharge to cast a particular Celestial spell again. One of the neatest spells you get from this school right at the start is the ability to slow down time. This puts the game into a May-Payne-style "Bullet Time" where you and everything else is moving in slow motion so it is easy to be very precise about your movements, allowing you to cut the enemies down and dodge their blows with the greatest of ease.
Nether magic seems like some kind of voodoo school of black magic. You mix together different strange components like eyes, flesh, plants, etc. They combine to give you different summoning type spells, or spells to enhance the power of your weapons. Like one such spell is Blade of Bhaal, and this one will enchant your weapon for a few minutes giving it an eerie blue glow and causing it to do major damage. Or you could use the spell to summon rats that will attack your enemies for you.
There is also a fourth school of magic called rune magic. This type of magic lets you find and scribe magical runes that can put enchantments on yourself or your equipment, which can make you more powerful and effective. You can combine different runes to form certain power words that can do different spells.
Rogues have an interesting min-game to deal with for picking locks and disarming traps. You have to click an icon with a shape on it as the matching shape is being passed by on a band above it. The bar that passes by the shapes goes faster if you do not have the skill for the lock or trap, so it is exceptionally difficult to pick a lock that your character doesn't have the skills to unlock. If you click the wrong shape at the wrong time, then you fail and if it's a trap you set it off. Different locks and traps have different levels associated with them, the higher the level, the more complex the trap and the more skill required on the part of the character AND the player in the mini-game.
If you decide not to take the rogue skills you can pretty much forget about getting into some of the chests, which just means you'll have less treasure. I never encountered any critical quest items or destinations that required picking locks. One bad thing about the way the traps were implemented is that if you have a skill 2 or 3 levels higher than the trap the bar goes so excruciatingly slow that it can take literally 20-30 seconds real time just to unlock the chest, even though the only way you can possibly fail is if you're just not paying attention or in frustration and boredom accidentally click too soon and spring the trap.
The graphics of Dungeon Lords are above par for the RPG genre. They are on par with a third person shooter style graphics. The grass moves with the wind, there is a night and day cycle. Water, however, looks kind of fake; the surface was too opaque and glossy. You'll see a lot of varied textures in the dungeons, where you'll spend a great deal of your time. The plant life in the outside world is detailed and realistic. Creature animations could have been done better in some cases but in others they look great. The graphical style of the creatures themselves was very gothic and dark, which fits the mood of the game well.
However, the real graphical highlight of Dungeon Lords are the varied and amazing looking spell effects. But even just normal melee fighting is a joy to watch, because it is so well animated. The fighting looks realistic, and your character can perform all kinds of moves that look very cool on the screen when you're doing them, if you take the acrobatics skill. If there is perhaps one flaw to the graphics is that it seemed a bit dark, like they were going for a "horror" feel to the game. However, there is a lot of variation in the types of dungeons, and there are some brighter areas than the initial one you start in.
There's not much screen real estate used up by interface, when you're fighting and running around, the only thing on the screen is a little icon of your character and your health-bar and experience-bar. This gives a good sense of immersion in the game since basically the entire screen is dedicated to the game environment. On the downside, however, buildings are all devoid of furniture and the world itself is pretty sparse as far as things you can actually interact with. Also the game would stutter for no apparent reason at times even though the graphics should have easily been manageable on my system, which is way above the minimum specifications.
The opening music for the game is great but that's about the only music I heard, the game itself is painfully devoid of sound and what little there is gets old very quickly. On the plus side, a lot of work went into the voice acting of most of the major NPC characters and those sounded good. Also the sound effects of the spells are good. But then again, weird glitches like a townswoman walking up to you and in a gruffy male voice saying "Leave me alone, I'm busy!" kind of ruins the immersion factor. Apparently the women of Fargrove are a bit butch.
There is a multiplayer mode for Dungeon Lords where you can supposedly get 8 of your buddies to join in for cooperative dungeon crawling. However, I could only get it to work a couple of times since the matchmaker lobby is never very crowded and the few times we did manage to get into a game it was too laggy to be playable. I don't know if this is planned to be fixed in a patch or what but this would definitely up the replay value to the game.
The game is pretty long, I've heard reports of upwards of 40 hours to complete, but since I ended up hitting a roadblock I couldn't see the ending. But when you get down to it, if you buy Dungeon Lords today you're paying $30-$40 for the privilege of beta testing an unfinished product, and I do not consider that to be good value no matter how many hours of gameplay are there.
Dungeon Lords had a lot going for it in concept. The graphics are very decent. The combat system works well, at least as far as melee combat is concerned. The game has an RPG veteran behind it and the story should have been very compelling. Dungeon Lords is a game that had a lot of potential and I was greatly disappointed that they decided to release the game in the state that it is in now.
Even after the 1.1 patch the game just feels incomplete. If you read my preview, you would know how positive I was about the project early on. But the bugs, missing features, missing sound, it all points to a game that could have been at least good if not excellent. I will chalk Dungeon Lords up as the biggest disappointment of 2005 most probably. Check back in a few months and if DreamCatcher does the right thing and allows Heuristic Park to complete this project, the game might be worth a go then.
You may wonder how I can rank the overall score a 4 when the individual component scores are clearly better than that. That's because this game isn't complete, and so neither is my score. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this game to anyone except the most desperate action/RPG’er who has extreme patience for software that doesn't work very well. Heuristic Park has said a 1.2 patch is in the works and hopefully one beyond that. At some point, if they keep working on it, I might can go back and re-review the game and give it a final score post-patches.