Dungeon Hero Preview and Interview

The guys at VideoGamer.com have slapped up a hands-on preview of Dungeon Hero to complement a two-page interview with Firefly Studios co-founder Simon Bradbury. An excerpt from the preview:

Our dungeon hero emerges from the underground and begins exploring the trenches. It’s here that we’re given our first look at the combat. “We wanted something that allowed you to do all of the moves without knowing all of the combos,” says Andrew Parsons, lead level designer. “We’re a bit sick of those kung-fu movies where they will all surround their target and take their turn to hit.” By holding the right trigger or the right mouse button you will go into block mode and from here our hero has a set of moves designed to cope with being surrounded. It’s all about strategically making space for critical strikes. Moves we saw included a side kick, a side shield bash and a back elbow, as well as weapon slices. The face buttons are mapped to the front, back, left and right directions. Pressing B on the 360 pad will, for example, make the hero attack to his right. The reverse is true for X. It’s designed to give Dungeon Hero’s combat a slower, more tactical feel, a tad more realistic than your typical hack and slash.

Waves of goblins attack but our hero is capable of dealing with them all. Attacks look meaty and powerful, sometimes sending goblins flying 20 metres into the air. We’re told players will be able to level up the face buttons, concentrating on different styles of play. A red bar shows the player’s rage – rage abilities will be automatic, we’re told, although we’re not quite sure how this will work. With the game over a year away it’s not the biggest of deals anyway. What we can be sure of is Dungeon Hero looks promising. It looks fun. It looks different, and it looks intelligent.

And a snip from the interview:

…you had the original idea four years ago and have been working on it for three years now, it seems quite a departure from what you guys normally do. Why do a hack and slash dungeon crawler?

SB: There’s the idea side of it. I like seeing it from a different perspective, make it less of a cliché. There’s kind of an arcade quality of the game, this goes back to the original Gauntlet co-op, I kind of like that. I like the idea of just going in there and bashing your way through. There will be a side by side co-op version of the game which will have its own unique modes, so you can play it with your mate while you’re drinking beer. That visceral fighting done well. It’s not just a meatheady bash bash bash. There’s tactics to it, a slightly slower-paced combat in some ways but you’re getting it right, there’s a really good feel to it, there’s not that many games like that. It’s a game that I would like playing. I suppose it’s quite selfish really.

We decided we would go for castle builder because there wasn’t anything like it. So we wanted to go for a game that was unique in several different ways. It’s got visceral arcadey combat but it’s not a straight hack and slash. It’s a hard one to pin down. It’s kind of hack and slash, kind of dungeon crawler, bit more arcadey though. It does a dungeon from a realistic perspective. We wanted to pick an area from a hard headed business side as well as the passion that we could go in and make our own, like with Stronghold.