Strangetimez

So, I was given a copy of Dungeon Defenders from a mate, and being a big fan of Tower Defense games I was hooked.   There was  great progression through the maps, the game adjusted difficulty as I got better etc.  The maps were challenging, but beatable with some practice and refinement.

THEN, I got on to the next set of maps, and the challenges.  What a FUCKING JOKE.  DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME AND ENERGY.  These maps suddenly got stupidly hard, especially for solo play.  So I thought I would try online – get a few random people in to play through some and earn a few achievements… and that was WORSE.  No only does the game reuglarly drop its connection, its a bandwidth hog – EVERY TIME you pick an object up it has to verify its authenticity with TrendyNet.  That might be well and good for people with a server only a few miles to a few thousand miles away.   Here in Australia, with more expensive, slower, and worse internet infrastructure, these drop outs make playing the game nearly impossible.

No joke, I find my self getting through a couple of waves and thinking that, wow, I might actually get to complete this map, or die trying at least, without a disconnect.

So, given that TrendyNet and the developers of Dungeon Defenders have latched on to this cash cow, they seem to be too high and mighty to address many of the complaints that pop up through each patch / update.  They are up to version 7.12 as of writing this.  7 MAJOR version, and they still cant fix some the basic mechanics of their software?

Anyways – here is a summary of the issues you WILL face when you make the mistake of wasting part of your life on this game:

• Dropouts, crashes, disconnects OFTEN
• Getting stuck on the scenery.  Characters will get blocked by the smallest piece of scenery that any normal game character should just slide straight past.
• Ive seen mosters wander off in funny directions and get stuck in scenery too.  Then to have them reappear somewhere completely different.
• I often play on a low end laptop.  Other games play fine on low detail settings.  Dungeon Defenders graphics settings make very little difference to performance.  Their textures and models are all high detail, and don’t get their polygon counts reduced for low detail settings.  The only change that helped performance was to go to the absolute minimum resolution (640×400)
• The Android version of this game is EVEN WORSE.  The characters are completely uncontrollable as you have to strafe capability, and you end up fighting the camera all the time
• The different view settings (over shoulder to top down views) are more frustrating than useful.  You cannot see the RANGE of your towers with any of these views, so you have to guess to work out if your tower will reach the area you want it to protect
• The upgrade function on Towers is really frustrating.   Even if you have one tower in front of you, and it might be the only one, and you run up to it to upgrade it, the cursor will shoot off and reposition itsself at the nearest tower in range with the lowest rank, ready to upgrade that one.  If Im STANDING RIGHT AT A TOWER, DONT assume I want to upgrade a completely different one?!
• The challenges: what a fucking joke (incase I havent said that).  Forget about their “reccommended level”.  Thats a load of bullshit.  A level 70 character seems to have LESS chance of beating a map than a lower level character.
• And, all through the normal maps, the rule seems to be no time limit on harder or lower difficulty.  Once you try a challenge, youll find arbitrary time limits for building, and fighting, ON ALL DIFFICULTIES.
• After level 70, your ability to level up is SEVERELY reduced.  It has taken more time to get from level 73 to level 74 (after many hours of playing Im still only 1/4 there), than it took to get from level 60 to level 72.
• As I may have mentioned – the game adjusts the difficulty, seemingly based on what towers are present, rather than the Heroes that are defending them.  So, using a low level character, then bringing in a high level to build a few towers, and switching back to the low level character results in enemies so tough that you have no chance of beating them.
• The developers either dont seem to care about the less obsessive players, or they are insisting on us playing until our fingers bleed in order to have some fun.
• Dont mistake the number of hours played as an indication that the game is enjoyable.  Its an indication of how much time and effort you need to put in, in order to have a chance of even playing through all the levels you have paid for.
• Dont waste your money on the Downloadable content.  You only get more unplayable challenges that are so stupid its pretty much luck that will determine if you will beat them.   Or you can buy a few outfits for your character, and access to other hero types- which are really a copy and paste of the first 4 with a couple of tweaks.  DUNGEON DEFENDERS DLC IS A WASTE OF MONEY!
• If you prefer solo play, again, dont bother buying this game.  You will only get about half way through without wanting to tear your hair out in anger and frustration.  Or, you can just go over the same level repeatedly to farm experience points, but that becomes as exciting as watching grass grow after a short period of time.
• I can waltz through a stage on Insane with a boss at the end of it , barely having any damage done to the crystals (eg The Throne Room etc).  Then when the boss shows up, its like my defences just dont exist. (even with my Tower spec’d Level 73 Apprentice)  The enemies waltz though like they arent there, and its game over.  Start again, laboriously re-placing towers AGAIN, just to die slightly differently next time the boss shows up.  The Ancient Dragon was no different..  Would it be that hard to have “play this wave again” option instead of building eveything from scratch?
• Classes like the Huntress cannot test their towers in the Tavern, like just about every other class can.  How the hell can we fine tune our character when we cant even get an accurate idea of how the trap is working, what damage its doing, its range, and so on.
• Speaking of interface stupidity:

1. Get rid of the fucking START option that pops up after the intros.  I am not on an XBOX, Im on a PC, at least take the time to remove pointless screens and extra clicks.
2. TrendyNets fucking messages ALWAYS appear when you connect and you have to close them to proceed.  I dont even bother to read it anymore it changes so rarely.
3. Its now February.  GET RID OF THE CHRISTMAS CRAP OUT OF THE TAVERN.
4. Dont make me Re-pick the same character EVERY TIME I connnect to TrendyNet
5. The middle scroll wheel is the WORST button to use out of any input we have access to.  People ALWAYS accidently scroll while pressing it.  Which means when you want to sell something (for example), you often are fighting with your camera.  Change it.
6. Why can the Apprentice only use his spell casting buff in combat… WHY??  Let him use it during the build phase too – its not that big an advantage considering his disadvantages.
7. Positioning Towers is a time wasting exercise.  When building a tower – it would be nice if the screen just showed the areas that you can build (green transparent overlay or something?).  Instead you have to carefully move the mouse around until you find just that one pixel wide spot where you know the tower can go, wasting heaps of build time.  Hell, you do it with upgrades – snap the tower to where it can be built.  You will also find trouble with orientating your towers depending on your current camera view.  If you are in an up close view , and you want to put a tower infront of you, you will often find that itll swing around to face towards you, instead of away.  The cursor just gets screwy.
8. Give me an option to go to my Tavern, or Quit the game completely, from any point in the interface workflow.   Dont make me go back through EVERY FUCKING SCREEN to get out of the game.  ALT+F4 wont even kill it quickly.  DD usually crashes when you try and switch to the task manager, or just locks up.
9. Incase the message wasnt clear enough, When I finish a level, let me return to the tavern, instead of having to load up the next level, then quit out of it, just so I can they get out of TrendyNet.  Then get out of the game menu, then I can quit completely.  Trust me, there are times when Id like to just get out of this frustrating piece of shit, but even the menus manage to add to that frustration.

Look, I like a challenging game, one that will make you think and have a bit of fun, that isnt too easy.  Or too hard.  But seriously guys, find some middle ground.  Just because you and all your mates have the best gear and stats, doesnt mean us plebs do.  Stop testing the game (Im assuming they do occasionally test it) with these ridiculous characters and try playing though as a normal player (or solo) and see how frustrating it is.

I want to like this game, and I did, very much, for awhile.  Now I despise it, it gets me angry, it wastes too much of my time for too little reward, and I dont often even get to complete a game because of their abysmal network infrastructure.  I hope the developers read some of this and take note, but I doubt they will.   They dont pay much attention to complaints on the forums.  For each person like me complaining there are at least 100 more who are shitted off too, but havent complained.    I also hope everyone out there reads this before considering buying Dungeon Defenders.  its cheap, and good for a few hours to kill, but dont expect any more.  The reason I didnt post this in a forum is that Im also sick of the chearleading squads that are often employed to troll the forums and say how great the software is, to every complaint.  And that the people that should be reading it, dont.

Incase you dont know it, Im a programmer / analyst / developer.    These sorts of problems should be OBVIOUS to any developer who has tested things out properly.   Im so sick of companies like this relying on patches and updates to make up for the fact that they dont test their software out fully before release.  These problems are definitely fixable if they could be bothered, but I guess if the money keeps rolling in, do the minimum required to support the people who have already paid.

Rating:  When I first got it 3.5/5.  Now after playing it for many hours, Id give it  1.5/5.    If you want to play a casual game and not get too involved, give it a go.  If you are likely to get involved in a game, go and spend your money somewhere else.  Otherwise, more than likely, you’ll end up quitting playing Dungeon Defenders in frustration.