App review: Dungeon Hunter

review by Steve Loopipe


Most gamers have a game or a series of games that hold a special place in their hearts. For me, one of those series is Diablo – It was one of the first games I got for my college computer, and I actually built a PC specifically to be able to play Diablo 2 when it came out.  And though Diablo 3 is on its way, any game that even comes close is worth a try for me.  So I was cautiously optimistic when Gameloft announced Dungeon Hunter – It walked like Diablo and it talked like Diablo, but I had the impression of Gameloft as an opportunistic company that churns out clones of popular games for the iPhone to make a quick buck.  Eventually, though, the trailers looked good and my curiosity got the better of me, and I’m glad that it did, because otherwise I would have missed out on one of the best games that you can currently buy for your iPhone.

Dungeon Hunter is an action hack-and-slash RPG in the spirit of games like Diablo and Dungeon Siege.  Put simply, your character travels from dungeon to dungeon (hence the name), slaying monsters and collecting loot, which makes your character strong enough to tackle more difficult dungeons with better loot.  Lather, rinse, and repeat.  It’s a simple formula, but with enough variety, it can be extremely addictive, as Diablo and its sequel have proven over the years.

In Dungeon Hunter, you play a king who has been killed by his bride, who was taken over by evil forces and now rules the land in a reign of terror.  To save the land from the evil queen, your character is raised from the dead to reclaim his kingdom. Coming to his aid are several fairies, each corresponding to a natural element, and with incredibly clever names like Wetty and Hotty.  The story’s really not much to speak of, but once the action starts, the story does a decent job of getting out of the way of the gameplay. You just choose from warrior, rogue or mage, and get down to business killing evil minions.

Dungeon Hunter’s story might be lacking, but the gameplay is spot on for a game of this genre, and it even makes some much needed improvements that took me by surprise.  You can either control your character via tapping where you want to go on the screen or with a virtual analog stick.  While the touch controls are a nice homage to Dungeon Hunter’s PC ancestors, the pathfinding doesn’t really work well enough to use, but the virtual sticks work very well.  You also get a main action button (talk, attack, open, etc.), a fairy magic button, and three skills, which can either have separate buttons on screen or one button that you can swipe left and right to toggle between skills.  I found the former a better option than the latter, even though it clutters up the screen a bit more, since swiping between skills in the middle of an intense battle can be dangerous.  All in all, though, once you get the controls tweaked to your liking, it works extremely well, and I never really felt like the control was inferior to a mouse and keyboard.

The really pleasant surprise, and what Gameloft really got right, was the loot.  First of all, there’s a lot of it, which is always a good thing in a game like this.  But even better than the quantity is the amount of work went into letting you manage it all.  Just showing you the current selected item side by side with what you have equipped is nice, but even better is the auto-equip button which automatically determines the best configuration for your character based on his current inventory.  It’s not perfect, and it certainly does need to be tweaked manually in some circumstances, but it’s great to be able to just press a button and remove 90% of the tedium of choosing what to wear; after all, this is a game, not a Barbie doll.  Another really nice feature is the ability to automatically transmute items you don’t need into gold in the middle of a level, instead of having to go back to town in the middle of the level to sell your stuff to make room in your inventory (though you do get more money in return if you do).  You can even set the game to automatically convert all items below a certain quality level to save you even more time…
The graphics are among the best I’ve seen on the platform, as well.  Your character noticeably changes appearance when you switch armor or weapons, and the dungeons and enemies are well animated (albeit slightly cartoonish) and nicely detailed.  The music is appropriately atmospheric as well, and there are some decent sound effects.  You can also play your own music via the built in player (though the game doesn’t respect music that was playing when the game is launched), though that mutes all the sound effects.

The game isn’t perfect, of course.  The levels are fairly linear, and though there are side quests, you’ll usually end up completing them without actually having to go very far out of your way to do so; I actually couldn’t tell which quests were part of the main story and which ones were side quests most of the time.  There also could be more variety in the skills, especially for the mage, where a number of the skills are the same thing just with different elemental damage.  

What really keeps the game from being perfect, though, are the load times, which, while understandable given the complexity of the game, are excessive, often taking 30 seconds to a minute to load a level.  What’s worse, the load times pop up even if you just go back to the world map or are unlucky enough to die and restart a level.  Needless to say, this is not a game you can pick up and play in a spare five minutes, especially given that, if you leave the game and come back, the game will keep all your loot and experience, but will start you back at the beginning of the level you were on.  So there are times when I’d like to play Dungeon Hunter, but I ultimately end up playing something else because I don’t have the time to devote to it.

Despite the load times, Dungeon Hunter is worth the wait, and is really one of the premiere gaming experiences on the iPhone today. In fact, this game has completely changed my opinion of Gameloft as a company; this effort has proven that, even if the initial concepts for their games aren’t breaking any new ground, they were able to take something like Diablo and take it to the next level, while pushing the envelope of the iPhone platform at the same time. If you’ve enjoyed either of the Diablo games or anything similar, it’s worth the $5 to buy Dungeon Hunter.  You’ll get ten hours or so out of the game each time through, and playing with each character type is very close to being a completely different game, so you could easily squeeze between 20 and 30 hours out of it, which is what you’d expect from a full-priced console game.  So stop reading this review, go buy Dungeon Hunter, and see why Nintendo and Sony are concerned about the iPhone killing the DS and PSP.

Dungeon Hunter is available for $4.99 in the App Store.