Dungeon Lords MMXII Review

Introduction

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Such could be the motto of Heuristic Park, which released Dungeon Lords in 2005, then the Dungeon Lords Collector’s Edition (CE) in 2006, and now Dungeon Lords MMXII in 2012.  The original game set a new low for how buggy and incomplete a game could be and still get released.  The CE fixed a lot of the bugs and made the game more functional, but Heuristic Park (or perhaps then publisher DreamCatcher Interactive) lost any goodwill the edition might have engendered by choosing to charge for it rather than making it a free patch.  And now there’s MMXII, which aims to create the final and definitive version of Dungeon Lords, but it’s buggy and sloppy, and in my view it’s not even as good as the CE.

Just in case you missed Dungeon Lords the first time around — or if the reviews scared you away — the game was essentially an action RPG.  You played an anonymous hero, and after receiving a mysterious summons from the Celestial Order, you learned that you’d need to track down and acquire five Relics of Power so you could defeat the evil wizard Volgar.  Fortunately, the game did not rely on this overfamiliar story.  Instead, it won players over with fun combat, well-designed dungeons, and a complex character system.

For MMXII, Heuristic Park left the campaign almost untouched.  The quests, locations, and NPCs are all the same (and include everything from the CE); there are just a few new monsters and mini-bosses sprinkled around, including a powerful worm in the introductory theater sequence.  Instead, the changes for the game come in two areas: the character system and the interface.

Characters

When you start a game of Dungeon Lords (MMXII or otherwise) you first create your character, which means you have to pick a name, a race, a gender, and one of four core classes (Adept, Fighter, Mage, or Rogue).  Then as you play through the game, you get to add four more classes to your character: another core class, plus two second tier classes, plus one third tier class.  The original Dungeon Lords had 29 second and third tier classes, and this was increased to 30 in the CE and 34 in MMXII, giving you all sorts of options for how to advance your character.

In the original versions of the game, you’d improve your attributes and skills by spending experience points on them.  These costs could get pretty high, and so you had to pay attention to your character build.  That’s because your classes would give you learning bonuses for certain skills — Fighters, for example, received bonuses for weapon and armor skills — and some skills were almost impossible to learn without the right bonuses.  For example, to become a Deathlord, you needed ten ranks each of Heavy Armor, Heavy Shields, and Heavy Weapons, and without a massive amount of grinding, you just weren’t going to achieve that without getting multiple bonuses from your other classes.

Unfortunately, Heuristic Park junked this system in MMXII.  Now characters just get 3 attribute points and 3 skill points each time they gain a level, and classes no longer have any sort of skill or attribute point requirements, meaning no character planning is necessary.  That makes the game easier to play, but I wouldn’t exactly call it an improvement.

Skills and spells also saw some changes.  In the original versions of the game, all characters could cast spells from all four schools of magic (Arcane, Celestial, Nether, and Rune), and by collecting more copies of a spell, you could cast it more often.  Now in MMXII, characters can only learn spells from the schools of magic associated with their core classes, they can only have one copy of each spell, and spells have a mana cost and a cooldown.  Meanwhile, the skills got rearranged.  Instead of skills referring to “light,” “medium,” and “heavy” weapons and armor, they now refer to different types of weapons and armor, and so there are skills for swords, daggers, chain mail armor, plate armor, and so forth.

I found these changes to be depressing.  In both cases, Heuristic Park downgraded something from being unique and interesting to being just like every other RPG out there.  I used to think that the homogenizing and dumbing down of games was due to publisher interference, but it’s tough for me to believe that anybody interfered with Heuristic Park over MMXII.  So maybe developers are starting to believe that they can only be successful if their games are just like everybody else’s, when — for me at least — the exact opposite is the truth.  Give me something brilliant and possibly flawed rather than the same old stuff I’ve seen countless times before.

Interface

Heuristic Park also tried improving the interface, and while they had more success here than they did with the character system, about half of their improvements came with annoyances.  For example, in the original versions of Dungeon Lords, there were only ten saved game slots, which weren’t nearly enough given how buggy the game was.  But now in MMXII, you can have as many saves as you want, and there are even autosaves… but the game creates a brand-new autosave every time you change maps or quit the game, leaving behind a trail of saves that even Hansel and Gretel would be proud of.  All of these excess saves mean that every so often you have to go back and delete 20 or so saves — and hopefully not delete a good save by mistake — when it shouldn’t be necessary.  I have no idea why Heuristic Park didn’t just use one autosave, or perhaps rotate through three autosaves or something.

Or consider the inventory system.  In the original versions of Dungeon Lords, you had a great big inventory, but there weren’t enough filtering options to make it easy to see what you were carrying.  Now in MMXII, you have six inventory bags — one each for weapons, armor, jewelry, potions, junk, and quest items — that sort items for you.  The problem is that each bag only holds 20 items, and you quickly run out of room.  So instead of seamlessly playing the game, every 15 minutes or so you have to fiddle with your inventory and drop stuff so you can pick up more stuff.  Worse, you’re not allowed to drop quest items, but some quest items (like shadow stones from the Shadow Ruins) drop way more often than they’re used, and if you pick them all up, then they overflow your quest items bag and start taking over the rest of your inventory space.

Or consider the control scheme.  The original versions of Dungeon Lords had a perfectly acceptable scheme, where you’d use the WASD keys to move, the mouse to steer, and the left shift key to interact with things.  Now in MMXII, there are two modes.  Mouse look mode works just like the original scheme, except it uses E for interactions (making it just like Bethesda’s control schemes).  Meanwhile, in Point & Click mode, steering and movement are done with the WASD keys, and the mouse is used for interactions.  The problem here is that Mouse look mode is far more convenient to use, but in that mode the game doesn’t indicate when you can interact with something; you can only see that in Point & Click mode, which otherwise seems pretty useless.  So instead of one acceptable control scheme, the game comes with two semi-broken ones.

But not all of the interface changes are bad.  The game now has a very friendly hotkey bar where you can trigger up to 12 potions or spells.  There’s a new map screen that makes it easier to see your surroundings.  All of your spells and nether katals are now automatically stored in a spellbook rather than your inventory, which makes it easier to sort through them.  You no longer have to exit to the main menu to load a game.  The game now supports wide screen monitors.  You can now alt-tab away from the game.  Overall, even with the annoyances, the interface in MMXII is better than the interface in the earlier versions.

Gameplay

As I mentioned earlier, Dungeon Lords (regardless of the version) is an action RPG.  You control a single character, and you’re allowed to swing weapons, cast spells, block with a shield, and make defensive rolls.  The blocking and rolling are necessary because numerous enemies can debilitate you in some way — banshees can freeze you, trolls can stun you, witches can entangle you, and so forth — and so the more attacks you can avoid, the better off you are.  Dungeon Lords isn’t really a game where you just click on an enemy until it dies.

As you explore your surroundings, you frequently come under attack.  The spawn rate for monsters is outrageously high (no matter how you adjust the settings) so you never clear out a dungeon or a region, and you have to stay on your toes.  You don’t encounter a huge number of enemies in the game, but they fight you in different ways, and you have to change your tactics accordingly.  For example, when banshees spawn, you have to keep your shield ready so you can block their spells, or else they might freeze you and slowly whittle away your health.

Along with combat, you also have to explore several major dungeons.  The dungeons are fun, and you have to deal with traps, puzzles, action sequences, and secret rooms — not to mention tons of enemies — as you make your way through them.  Each dungeon also has a unique look and feel.  Unlike some modern games, Heuristic Park didn’t do any cutting and pasting with their creations.

Finally, Dungeon Lords also includes numerous quests, but they’re pretty basic.  You’re mostly just tasked with fetching something, delivering something, or (more than likely) killing something.  This is an area where MMXII could have easily improved upon the original versions of the game, but didn’t.  Even the new classes didn’t receive new ascension quests.  Heuristic Park just re-used old quests, and sometimes they didn’t even bother to change the names, and so the Dragonlord’s ascension quest is called the Shaolei Master’s Quest.

Bugs and Other Issues

Let me start with the good news here.  The original versions of Dungeon Lords had bugs in them that could prevent you from completing the game.  In the original Dungeon Lords, sometimes the gate leading out of the starting city wouldn’t open, preventing you from seeing about 90% of the game, and even in the CE, the Shadow Ruins were broken, and if you left that area before collecting the Relic of Power, then there wasn’t any way to get back inside, and your game was broken.  As far as I’m aware, no bugs like that exist in MMXII.  The MMXII bugs are just irritations.

At first, when MMXII came out, I was optimistic.  Within a week of its release, a patch came out with a useful fix (originally there wasn’t a hotkey for opening your inventory bags, and the patch added one).  But since then, it’s been radio silence, even though there are obvious problems with easy solutions.

So what’s currently wrong?  None of the skills or spells have descriptions, making it difficult to tell what they do.  Weapons along with armor can be damaged, but weapons lose durability so fast that there isn’t any way to keep them repaired (there’s a repair skill, but for some reason repair kits are rare drops, and so the skill is almost worthless).  Once you pick up a Crystal of Life (which happens early in the game) death no longer has a penalty.  There isn’t any way to advance time, so sometimes you’re forced to explore in the dark.  It’s possible for high-level characters to lose the ability to learn new spells.  The game is sloppy with quest items, and you can lose half of your inventory space to them.  The game automatically decides whether you should use a ranged or melee weapon, but this process is a disaster, and it probably means you won’t equip a ranged weapon.  The manual wasn’t updated properly, and half of its information refers to the original game and is no longer relevant.

But probably the biggest issue with MMXII is that it is disturbingly easy.  The main failing here is that Heuristic Park added a bunch of new random equipment — including uncommon (green), rare (blue), and epic (purple) items — which allow characters to become much more powerful than they were before, but the enemies weren’t changed at all, and so most battles are now mismatches.  After completing the game, I went back to a thread in our forums where people posted their stats after completing the original game, and the differences were staggering.  Among other things, my character had about 30 (!) times as much health and three times as much armor.  Heuristic Park desperately needs to re-balance the game.

Conclusion

After playing through MMXII a couple of times, I went back and played the CE for a while, just to make sure I wasn’t looking back at it with rose-colored glasses.  I wasn’t, at least not completely.  Every version of Dungeon Lords has had issues, but the CE was the culmination of three patches, and it remains the best.  MMXII looks like it wasn’t playtested at all, and it could use three patches of its own.  There isn’t any way I can recommend MMXII at $15 when you can buy the CE for $6.