Review: Dungeon RunnersFollow

A few days ago, I downloaded and started playing a little game called Dungeon Runners. It's published by NCSoft, the same company who distributed City of Heroes, Lineage and a host of other games. The CoH relation is fitting because, like City of Heroes, Dungeon Runners is a fast-paced game, designed to give you a fun experience in a short time.

The idea of Dungeon Runners is to give the core MMORPG experience (slaying mobs and getting loot) without all the additional trappings. Travel time is almost nil with a single town (cunningly named 'Townston') serving as a hub to the various dungeon crawling locations. Only a single dungeon, the "Horrible Dungeon of Legend" has a death penalty (75% stat reduction for 3min) and the rest merely send you back to Townston to rejoin the battle. There's no keying quests, no grinding reputation and no lengthy corpse runs. Dungeons are instanced and mobs remain cleared until you either log out for 15min or else manually reset the instance. Portal scrolls are plentiful which open a gateway back to Townston (and then right back to where you opened the scroll) for easy sale or banking of your swag.

Speaking of swag, the game surrounds itself with a definate tongue in cheek attitude and aims for plenty of satire of its genre. The newbie zone opens with a queue of would-be NPC warriors waiting to enter the first dungeon and hoping that the line moves quickly enough (no, you don't have to wait). NPCs have voice-overs of various celebrity impersonations and include snappy sayings. Among the usual gather quests for pelts and ooze are audits of the dungeons, temperature measurements and a request to retrieve the five rings from Captain Pollution. The standard magical item naming convention of "Thingie Item of the Animal" seen in WoW has been done over the top.Dungeon Runners is a "Classless" game in that anyone can use the skills from any trainer and the inital character generation mainly serves to set you up with the gear and initial skills of an archtype: Fighter, Mage or Ranger. As you progress, your "fighter" can learn to cast fire bolts or spray poison AoE debuffs. In fact, your class title is dynamic and depends entirely on what skills you have in your hotbar. Shifting skills may change you from a "White Paladin" to a "Barbarian" to a "Pyromancer". Character generation pretty much consists of selecting a name, gender, face, hair style and color. It's not in-depth but it's more than enough to quickly make a ranger with questionable depth perception.Graphics in Dungeon Runners aren't cutting edge but they're certainly servicable, especially for a free game. It shares some of WoW's cartoonish look both in scenary, mobs and weapons.




You know, I want to take a moment to point out that last picture. It's not immediately apparent but that red dude has a hook for an arm and is dragging along a big stuffed doll on a chain. When he attacks, he swings it at you. That's pretty messed up.

Back to the game. Although Dungeon Runners very solo-friendly, there are also grouping functions and a guild function is supposedly in the works. Grouping can be done the old fashioned way or else by setting yourself to auto-join and letting the game build you a group as others become available. A function allows people to teleport instantly to the group leader so there is no travel time involved and you can get immediately to the task of killing things. There is also a difficulty slider which ranges from Normal to Insane. At the more difficult levels, mobs hit harder, have more hit points but also drop more loot. "Normal" is pretty simple to solo but "Insane" will call either for friends or at least the use of a lot of potions.

A quick note about two other things -- First, there is almost no in-game economy. Most of your loot will be sold to the vendors for coin and that coin will largely go to train skills and to buy some health/mana potions. You can trade items between characters but not coins. So you see stuff being given away or the occassional request to trade a mage-oriented rare hat for something more fighteresque but that's about it. There are in game weapon/armor vendors but you'll rarely, if ever, use them given the number of drops you receive while fighting. The other thing is that the game is multi-player but it's not really "massive". There's five US servers, a PvP server and a European (?) server which won't show up on your server list. Server populations range from 60-200 users so you're talking about less than a thousand people online. But because Townston is so small, it never really feels abandoned and the dungeons are instanced anyway. Your characters are available on any server and, in fact, the PvP server is strictly an arena type affair and doesn't have any PvE content. World chat is relatively sane with the occassionaly numbnut but largely it's just harmless chatter which is nice to break up the solitude of soloing (if you decided to solo).

The cost for the game? Free. Free users have access to all of the dungeon areas but they are restricted from using upper tier loot or the bank. For a mere $4.99 a month, you can open those features and you'll probably be tempted to the first time you loot a rare 'purple'. In the works is an ad-based system for free users where they will have access to some higher tier loot and the bank but the game screen will include a banner ad and a chance for an ad during load screens (zoning/death). Paying users obviously won't see ads at all.

So, is the game worth it? Well, for free it's certainly worth a try. The game is polished, recently had some new features/skills added and is fun for what it is. That's also the potential downside -- there's no crafting, no role-playing, no extra towns, no auction house, no factions or reputation... just the dungeon crawls. Some users on the forums say they want this stuff but it would change Dungeon Runners from a send-up satire of the genre into a bona fide MMORPG which isn't what the developers really wanted. Personally, it only took me a day or so before I paid my five bucks for the month. Maybe I'll be sick of it in three weeks but I've paid a lot more money for games which have entertained me far less. If you want a quick, fun hack 'n slash the Dungeon Runners will probably fill that void. If you want an in depth role-playing experience, you'll probably want a more traditional MMORPG.

Edited, Nov 8th 2007 8:47am by Jophiel

Awesome review Joph. Mind if I copy this over to the Wikibase?

Not at all. I posted here mainly because I (a) Am not real familiar with creating Wikis and (b) figured it would go unread in its own sub-forum if no one knew about the game to go looking.

Here you go, if you want to fiddle with formatting and edit it any further, the Wiki is Dungeon Runners

Yeah, I don't see it becoming a multi-year obsession but, if I get bored after a month or two, it's $10 spent. More than once I've installed a $40 game, played it for a week and never touched it again.

Oh, my favorite clip is the hermit vendor in the newbie spot.
"You know that other town where everyone talks like it's the Renaissance? Yeah, those guys suck!"

Edited, Nov 8th 2007 1:18pm by Jophiel

I started playing this too, when school gets out I'll be looking for a MMO to get into and this one seems to fit the bill perfectly. Great find.