Recent reviews by Jimmy Poppadopolos

Came back after a few years, a lot of things changed since then.

On a surface level the gameplay is fine, especially if you have no desire to play past the mid-game. They also made changes to equipment where a hero can be build as both a DPS/Tank and a builder, which is a nice addition. If you plan to get invested in the game, however, there's a very clear incentive where they want you to spend money.

You'll start out with the 4 heroes from the original Dungeon Defenders, the others you unlock with medals or with real money. As of writing, the game has a total of 18 heroes. Farming for medals in-game, once the initial quests have run out, either requires you to do a few weeks of weekly/daily quests to unlock 1 hero, or you complete about 400 levels, each of which taking between 10 and 30 minutes depending on your level of efficiency and chosen map, to unlock 1 hero. Medals, however, are also required for upgrading/combining gear and buying shards that your RNG won't allow you to have. So unless you have a friend that carries you through the game, unlocking heroes through medals will take longer than it may initially appear to.

There's just a lot of quality of life missing from the game. Some heroes can feel a bit clunky to play in terms of movement, like certain abilities canceling all your aerial momentum, and things like the bag system has horrible filters. With all the different kinds of modifiers and stats you can have on gear, it is ridiculous that you cannot filter any of them. Looking for a helmet that grants attack damage? Better go through all your helmets to see which ones gives that stat. Looking for a Relic that makes your towers deal poison damage? Better look at every single relic you have to see if that mod is on there.

The game also has an auto-loot option, where, upon ending the building phase, any item that matches you criteria will be added to that specific bag, assuming it has space to contain it. Your filtering options are limited to: certain heroes, certain rarities, and item type (aka gear, consumable, pet, etc.)


So I'll start this off by grabbing some text from the official Dungeon Defenders 2 website:

Originally posted by DD2:

Players will never be able to pay for gameplay advantage.

You absolutely can pay for advantages.

The game these days has a "shard" system that lets you slot your gear with specific upgrades. These shards need to be leveled for their bonuses to increase, and you can "gild" them, requiring an additional 10 shards of that type to fuse them. Gilding a shard allows you to upgrade it more and also prevents it from being downgraded back to level 1 when you decide to upgrade you heroes through something called "Ancient Power Reset". All in all, there's over 200, maybe even 300, different kinds of shards. You start out with a few of bags, each having 64 slots. Not only will these bag contain your gear, shards and upgrade materials, shards don't stack.

The obvious solution to this is a recently introduced "create a problem, sell a solution" strategy, which is the Shard Vault, which can house all your shards and stack them. By buying this you can keep all your shards during your time playing, whereas others will have to pick a few shards they wish to hold on to. This vault will cost you roughly €15, and, funnily enough, when you put your shards in there, their upgrade levels are reset when you take them out again. This, at time of writing this review, appears to -not- be a bug but an intended feature in order to make it easier to stack them.

Opening up with another quote from their website:

Originally posted by DD2:

We will be supporting the game using ethical in-game purchases.

In order to improve your gear, you need upgrade materials. These can be farmed in-game at a, initially, decent pace, but as you get closer to the endgame it becomes more and more grindy. To counter this grind, you can buy things like the upgrade material bundle. If you buy their €20 gem bundle TWICE, you will be just short of affording the bundle, meaning it will at least cost you €45.

What does this €45 get you? Enough materials to almost upgrade the gear for 1 hero. Keep in mind that, due to how the game is designed, they expect you to play around 4 heroes at most times.

As stated before, unlocking all the current heroes is quite the chore. If you wish to unlock all the heroes without paying, you'll be making this your full time job or a multi-year project. If you are willing to pay, however, you can get each hero for about €15. Alternatively you can get the "All Hero Bundle", which gives you all the heroes for roughly €40. Is this bundle's price relative to the amount of heroes you already have? No.

In public hubs, players can put items in their own little shop. You start out with just 2 slots and can increase them by spending gems. Your initial additional slots start at a price of what amounts to 50 cents. What the game doesn't tell you is that that price goes up every few slots, and you'll only know what a slot costs once you get to that slot.

Almost all relevant items and/or bundles are priced in such a way that you will be just short on enough gems if you buy the bundle closest in value to it. This means you either have to buy 2 bundles, or you buy the bundle just above it, which will give you "more value per € spent". In the modern games industry, this is often referred to as a predatory monetization scheme.

Fun game if you wanna play it alone or with friends for a few hours, but as you progress you'll slowly start feeling that nudge from the game to start spending money. Be it through FOMO, time-gating currency or spikes in difficulty.

Put over 100 hours into this game and I don't regret it. Ended up doing a normal playthrough and a NG+ playthrough. The combat of the game can be broken down into a few sections:

The game makes a distinct difference between a leader and non-leader unit. Leaders are units that contribute to the story of the game, have access to different types of equipment (which you unlock with side quests and/or using the character a lot), and an ultimate ability bar. Leaders also have 3 different types of stats you can invest into, which revolve around more damage, more survivability, or more utility. These stats also have an additional effect for every 5 points you put into them (up to 20 per stat), and maxing a stat also give you an additional effect related to that stat.

The main character of the game, Peony, is always required in combat (which is, imo, a bit of a letdown for replay-ability). The reason for this is that she is required to summon the Fae that help you out in combat.

Fae are additional units that can assist you in combat. Fae are summoned by Peony at the start of a fight, and can be viewed as Pokémon that are kept in Yu-gi-oh! cards. Fae have their own summoning cost, which takes up a part of your summoning capacity (capacity can be upgraded). To acquire Fae you beat them in combat, which gives a chance of them dropping their card. Picking up this card and finishing the fight lets you indefinitely summon them from the next fight onwards if you wish to do so.

Fae are generally used to complement your leaders, as they (apart from the most expensive Fae) are not strong enough on their own to take on many enemies.

The game has 7 "elements": Arcane, Lightning, Ice, Water, Earth, Wind, and Fire. There is an easy-to-access in-game guide as to which element hits harder/weaker against other elements. Each element also represents a type of buff you can give to an ally (a wind unit that targets an ally for a buff will give that ally additional movement, for example). Every in-game day, an element will be buffed (on Sundays, Arcane gets buffed, for example). Usually you won't have to care too much about this, but if at any point a Fire boss is giving you a hard time, you might want to do some non-story fights until you reach water day and try again. Some leader gear changes their element, too. Peony starts out as an Arcane unit, but can change element while in arcane mode by equipping an elemental scroll .

While defeating enemies, or reaching treasure chests during combat, you might find scrolls. Scrolls are items that can be equipped by leaders, which either modifies them in some way. You have scrolls that increase attack, protect you from super effect hits X times, or modify your character in some different way (like +1 movement, or bonus damage vs buffed enemies). The main issue with scrolls is that some of them can make a hard boss a cakewalk, or make average leaders amazing, raising the question whether they should all be available from the start (I got some of the last scrolls once I was halfway through NG+).

While Peony isn't downed in combat, she may use of up to 3 spells. Spells are cards that have their own effect/radius/cooldown. The variety of spells allows you to enable certain playstyles, or cover up your team's weaknesses. Just like with scrolls, however, spells have to be unlocked in a variety of ways, meaning the bigger variety of playstyles usually open up in NG+. Peony can also be upgraded to -1 the cooldown of her spells that are still on cooldown whenever she gets a killing blow on an enemy, making higher cooldown spells more viable if you invest in Peony as a DPS.

While I enjoyed the game thoroughly and highly recommend it, there are a few things to the game that I'm not a great fan off.

Some boss fights in the game have a boss guarded by pylons that buff the boss every turn. To weaken the boss you have to destroy these pylons, but hitting them triggers a "Flux" effect. Flux causes the pylon to randomly teleport somewhere else on the map if the hit doesn't kill it. If a boss is already giving you a hard time 'cause you can't gear yourself up to fight it in an ideal scenario (not having the right equipment/Fae/spells), having one or more of your characters chase down the pylons while the boss is beating down on your team can be pretty frustrating. And to add insult to injury, the boss often can summon additional pylons every x turns.

Once you are perfectly geared up bosses can become kinda stale if you min-max for it. Min-maxing entails using 1 certain character that completely trivializes most bosses once its fully decked out, and putting a tank next to it to prevent it from dying, even the final boss is not safe from this tactic.

The character in question can:
- Deal damage just by starting their turn
- Revive itself at the beginning of every round
- Passively heal its tank if its close enough to the unit, which the tank should be anyway
- Drop enemy Res once you got its story related weapon (Res protects against debuffs, making it possible to debuff bosses that usually are debuff immune)
- Drop enemy Apex (Apex protects against super effective hits X times)
- Drop enemy defense if you give it a -def on hit scroll.
- Chain a melee hit when its not their turn, despite being a ranged character (Chain hits are in any other case melee exclusive). This triggers all the above "drop" effects again.

Chaining these drop effects ~5 times/turn makes bosses have no res/apex, and negative defense. Want to make your boss fights harder by not using this character? You can, but this character is forced on you in the final boss battle, though it makes sense story-wise. Even bosses with intimidatingly large health/shield bars go down in less than 10 turns if you use this strategy.

In the end I still recommend this game a lot. The aspects of the game I don't like are small enough that they don't ruin my experience with the game by much. The fact that I wanted to do another playthrough immediately after finishing it should add to how much I enjoyed the game. I would say NG+ is a lot more fun than the initial playthrough. While your leaders are once again unlocked via story progression, all the other things you unlocked (Fae/Spells/Equipment), are instantly available again, letting your second playthrough be a bit more creative. NG+ also makes it so your leaders usually have all their stat trees maxed out, making it more viable to play without a tank in a lot of scenarios.

Absolutely love this game. The pacing is nice and the power ups you unlock throughout are very enjoyable to use, in my opinion. I do recommend to not play this game for multiple hours at once, just so you can spread the fun out a bit.

*Disclaimer: My displayed hours are incorrect due to having played the non-steam version long ago (also: Account creation via steam is broken, you can play it via steam but you need to create an account on the official DNEU website).

So I started playing Dragon Nest the level cap was 24, which is about 7-8 years ago by now (the current cap is lvl 95). In between then and now I've had my fair share of MMOs to play and always ended up coming back to Dragon Nest when I got bored of others. For an MMO Dragon Nest is rather simplistic. The combat is straightforward and requires you to dodge manually since X% dodge/block chance is something Dragon Nest hasn't heard of (except for the Paladin's Auto Block ability), though the hitboxes at times can be somewhat messy. This isn't a dealbreaker, though. Dragon Nest makes you feel like a powerful hero by giving you the ability to usually one-shot most small simple mobs with visually enjoyable area attacks.

Leveling is kinda nice in general, but at times can become a bit "grind-y". Especially in the early game, every dungeon will be visited mostly twice. In the later levels, however, the grind-y feeling will certainly hit you. By lvl 60+ you'll have to visit some dungeons over 5-6 times. This isn't that big of an issue since the game is all about feeling like a powerful hero and you still get to beat up groups of enemies, but a more common change of scenery would certainly be nice.

The game is also instance-based, meaning that outside of towns you won't be able to encounter random players/guild members. Once you leave town the only people you're still able to see will be party members.

As for the game's Cash Shop I like to mention 2 things:
- It provides players a lot of bonuses beyond just cosmetics.
- For PvE you most certainly are NOT required to use it. Even a Free Player, like myself, will be able to feel OP in the PvE.

If you enjoy simple MMOs that just have you whack some enemies around this is certainly a game you should try out. If you prefer more complex combat that requires you to focus on enemy animations and positioning, the endgame nests will certainly provide you that.

The game isn't perfect and can certainly be polished up quite a bit, but it certainly is a sweet time killer definitely worth a shot if you have a hard time finding a fun MMO.

Really love the gameplay and style this game went for. Battles are fun and from my experience about 30 hours in I'd say the classes balance each other out quite well.

Sadly the matchmaking could really be polished up. I'd be okay with some errors every know and then, nothing in life is perfect. For honor, however, really annoys me with the amount of connection issues I get while queuing up for a match. I have a stable internet connection and normally don't have to worry about disconnecting from a server or anything like that. And it just makes me want to ragequit the game whenever I'm playing a match I'm really enjoying, only to get a "an error has occured. Returning to main menu" message mid-game and dropping out. Something else that bothers me is when I'm in a fight, the game pauses for a sec, and a message pops up mentioning the server needs to be resynchronized. Obviously this always happens when you're right about to take someone out, and since resynchronizations rewinds time for a few seconds your opponent is now aware of how you were planning to finish the fight you had already won.

Would I recommend the game: Yes and no, but more opting for yes. The gameplay, once again, is really enjoyable. If the connection issues to other players could be resolved the game would be a lot better. If you're really masochistic you might even enjoy the rage you feel from dropping out mid fight. Perhaps you might wanna wait with buying it until the reviews turn more positive or mention that most of the connection issues have been fixed.

Read a sign on the ground saying "no Illusionary wall ahead". I hit the wall and no hidden passages were revealed. 10/10 most helpful community.

Great game, a lot of quests and many players. it is More of a PvP game but the PvE is nice as well!