Dungeon Fighter Live: Fall of Hendon Myre (2010) - Fantasy Video Game Review

As it was reduced last week I picked up Dungeon Fighter Live. It is a scrolling beat em up with RPG elements that is playable with up to three people over Xbox Live. As I have stated before I do not play online games as I have no friends to play them with, and I don't want to play with strangers in case they turn out to be cruel demons (of which there are sadly many).

Dungeon Fighter Live's plot revolves around a strange sickness that is infecting the humans in the fantasy land  the game takes place in. You play as either a gunman, a female brawler, or a serious sword fighter who set out to find the root of the disease and end up stopping a plot to open a gateway to a Hell dimension (or something). To do this you fight through a series of locations killing lots and lots of monsters.

For a game with 'dungeon' in the title there is a surprising lack of dungeons, in fact there are exactly zero dungeons here! The closest I got was a temple, but the temple looked suspiciously like a cavern. For the most part you fight through woodlands, so many woods and forests!. Many levels are only slightly different in look, most have the same couple of tunes playing, many have the same enemies. This is one addictive game but it cannot be called varied.

It looks fantastic, has a lovely anime style look to it. Every now and again comic book cut scenes made up of panels appear, these all look beautiful. There is a main village you can travel to after each level where townsfolk will sell you weapons, upgrade your special powers and items and sell you herbs. Some also give you quests (either collecting a set number of items from a level, or killing the levels boss). I could not stop playing this, but realised pretty early on that it was not going to be particularly interesting. New enemies are just re-skinned older ones, most the weapons and armour you pick up are useless, and as mentioned the locations are bland. Each 'dungeon' is designed in a grid of interconnecting areas. To progress you must kill all the monsters in an area then choose an exit. I could imagine it would be fun with friends, but for me I just just put on podcasts and auto piloted. It doesn't help that you have to play though each level 3 times before you are able to go on to the next one.

The collision detection is a bit suspect, if an enemy attacks you whilst you are doing a special move they will always stop your flow even if you have your sword inches from a monsters head it will just be cancelled. If you get knocked over you can be potentially killed before you are able to stand back up. If you get dazed you are supposed to be able to hammer your buttons to recover quicker but this never seemed to work, I was only able to recover if an enemy hit me. You start the game with 10 continues but I was disgusted to find that to get more you have to pay real money, as if I am going to do that!

Dungeon Fighter Live took up around ten hours of my life, it is really addictive, but just bland, and unexciting...plus there are no dungeons in it! (though plenty of zombies...)

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