Dungeonland

Question for you: when was the last time you and your friends all bought the new big triple-A title that had just come out, and you all talked it up and made plans to play together online? You got that game with the big multiplayer component and assumed it would mean lots of hours happily mucking about with people you know and love, right? How much of that game did you actually spend playing with your friends? If you answered, "basically nothing," was it because you got everyone together when they finally had the same night off, but nobody was at the same level?

As much as I enjoyed Diablo III and Borderlands 2 last year, they shared an inherent problem with games that involve gaining experience and leveling up. These games play best as a multiplayer experience, but if you play the game a lot without your friends, then you end up in a place that you can't play it with them. For all the Facebook chatter I had with people before the games' release dates, I spent barely any time playing the game with people that I knew. It's a difficult thing to synchronize unless you like to be that one guy that runs around killing everything with your epic level-72 battleswordaxe, while your friends play a metagame of "kill something, anything, before the wiseass kills it first."

This leaves you to the mercy of public games for the social experience, and I probably don't need to explain how those can drive someone to hate multiplayer games. For example, Dungeon Defenders was especially ruined for me when I discovered that pubbies could join games lower than their current level, so a high-level guy would jump in and kill everything for you, then pat himself on the back for power-leveling the noobs. And buddha knows I've been lured into several MMORPGs by friends who told me how wonderful the game was and that I should play with them, only to quit the game long before getting to the level that I could be useful to the guild. And no, the whole trick of "let's make alts that we only play with each other" has never worked. Never, never, ever.

I'm not sure if the creators of Dungeonland considered these things, but they've done something about it one way or the other. Dungeonland is a simple dungeon-crawler. There's currently only three classes, only three dungeons to replay, and not a lot to do on those levels other than repeatedly bash things in the face with X button. The different builds for those classes do grant new basic attacks and special moves, but the basic strategy won't change much. Notably, there's no experience to be gained for killing the bad guys. There are also no random loot drops, only stacks of coins, and even those will only purchase sideways upgrades. You start every game at about the same strength, and defeating a level is its own reward.

The game is also not balanced for solo play - if you log into the game alone, you get a pair of AI friendlies to shoot things with you. The bots aren't totally incompetent, but they don't know when to intelligently use consumables, or when to stand their ground or retreat, or how attack an open space where there might be hidden enemies. You especially need other human players when the game spawns an elite with random abilities, which are normally tough enough that you need to group enemies together, coordinate healing potions and stun attacks, and otherwise get everyone to look out for each other.

This all sets Dungeonland down as essentially Left 4 Dead via Castle Crashers. It's a game where you get a couple of friends or pubs together and stomp around for an hour, and no one has to worry about who's played the game more or who has the best gear. Failure happens often as you get overwhelmed by large waves of things or fail to work together, but the ease of getting into a new game means that you just laugh the thing off and start over. Anyone who does play the game often enough can set the difficulty settings higher for kicks and giggles. The game gets harder again if you grab a fourth player to act as the "Dungeon Maestro," who chooses which monsters get dropped on the field. If you go that route, I would suggest regularly switching the DM so that more than one person gets to mash the "evil laugh" button over and over (which actually exists).

My biggest issue with the game regards the online play. I never noticed just how important it is for the open games list to show other players' ping times. Much of my online time was spent trying to get into an game and getting immediately kicked out. I initially wondered if my roommate was wasting our bandwidth on bittorrent, but then I joined a couple of games where one player was having no trouble bouncing around while the other was doing the short-range teleports of a laggy connection. Without any kind of connection feedback, I couldn't tell if I was the one having issues, or if a Russian player was connecting with an N-gage on a satellite connection, or if the game's servers just aren't fully tuned up.

I otherwise have my doubts about Dungeonland's longevity. Without precision aiming or goals other than killing everything in front of you, I didn't get that sense of increasing my skill and developing some intrinsic goal for play. Thing is, it's a $10 game, and it's even cheaper if you get friends to go in for a four-pack. This is not going to be a game you buy to perfect your dungeon crawling skills and feel like you've accomplished something. This game is going to be the online version of Steve Jackson's Munchkin, where you trick a few other friends into buying it, you log on with Teamspeak running in the background, and you spend a few nights casually cursing each other out as you fail to protect each other from danger. I could think of more expensive and less amusing ways to get your friends together, and most of those require you to be at level 17 to join the quest.