Dungeon Stars Steam Action Hack ‘n’ Slash Preview

Dungeon Stars, the side scrolling hack n slash action game co-developed by Riposte Games & Co and Furnace Games, is only a matter of days away. Four days to be precise, but we’ve got our hands on this little gem a few days early. We’ve ventured in to its dark depths and we’ve hacked and slashed a lot of unsuspected monsters, but what did we think of it?

Read on to find out”¦

There isn’t much of a storyline in Dungeon Stars, not that there really needs to be of course. Your friends have been captured and help prisoner in various dungeons guarded by meddlesome and scary creatures. It’s up to you to go in their kill everyone trying to kill you, and rescue your friend.

There’s no more story than that, but intense storyline is not something you’d expect to see here anyway, so let’s move on to the gameplay.

To start with choose from one of three characters. There’s the ice mage, who can free enemies when she’s not concussing them with her mage staff; there’s the Venom Blade rogue character that uses poison and a large dagger, and then there’s the warrior who trades damage for a bit more survivability in the way of wearing heavy armour.

Once you’ve chosen your character, you can head off to your first dungeon. Dungeons are split into a number of levels. Each filled with a variety of creatures that you must destroy if you’re to get to the end of the level. As you can imagine, some are weak and can be despatched easily while others need you to block and attack with a little more strategy.

As you progress through the game and you rescue your friends, you can choose a few of them to join you, which gives you fall backs if your main character bites it, or you need a different tactic for a certain boss. Each hero has different special abilities so swapping your hero could well be the difference between life and death.

If you do take a bit too much damage, there are health potions that will restore some of your lost health, but these can be quickly used up so it’s generally better to learnt to avoid or block hits than to take the damage and heal afterwards.

The more levels you complete, the more chance of finding magical items (or potions) to increase your power. However, accruing XP and levelling is the better (but slower) way of increasing your power.

The control system is as uncomplicated as the gameplay. There are only three commands you need to learn, holding the right cursor key makes your hero block, tapping the left cursor key does a quick strike, while holding left charges a power attack that can break the enemy’s defence. Oh, I suppose there are also the keys for your special attacks, but I find it easier to use the mouse to click on these. The movement part itself is all automatic. Your hero will move until it gets to an enemy and will then stop until you’ve despatched it.

It has a nice difficulty curve, with my Mage I stormed through the first few levels but by the time I got to level 6, my potions were depleted and I was struggling to make it through with my main alive.

I’m playing the Dungeon Stars beta, so I expect there to be even more content by the time it hits full release. There are no obvious bugs or things that desperately need to be fixed, at least from my perspective so this means the next few months are only going to get even better for Dungeon Stars.

If you want to sign up for the Dungeon Stars Early Access head over to the Steam page on April 26^th. Stay tuned for more Info on TheZombieChimp.com when we have it.