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> Results: Dungeon Lords: Collector's Edition
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When originally released in early May of 2005, Dungeon Lords was a combat focused fantasy role-playing game that I described in the GamerDad Review as "a mess that was not ready for release." I also said, "the dungeons are very well designed, full of surprises and challenging puzzles and it is clear that the greatest effort went into their design." Nine months and four patches later, most of the bugs have been fixed and some features present in previews but not in the released game such as character customization and the auto-map have been added. Recently, Dreamcatcher released the Dungeon Lords Collector's Edition which "includes new quests, spells, effects, monsters and amazing new heraldries and character customizations to take your RPG experience even deeper". This poses some obvious questions. Does the sum total of all the patches and additions since the initial release make it worth buying if you skipped it so far? And if you already bought the initial release is the Collector's Edition worth paying full price again?
Some of the changes are immediately obvious. You can customize the appearance of your character and choose whether they are right or left handed. Other new features are welcome and noticeable, such as the addition of side-quests, new characters, spells, monsters and the fleshing out of areas that were vacant in the original. It's difficult to believe that a sixty hour role playing game would have no side-quests, but it is true. Every activity was related to either class advancement or the main quest in the original. The new quests (five or so) are typical ﾑkill something and return an item' scenarios, but are a nice addition. Similarly, filling in the game world by adding treasure caches in areas where you are told to ﾑtake whatever you need' and furniture in formerly empty buildings gives the game a more lively feel, but should have been included from the start. All of these additions take the focus away from how incomplete the game was and allow you to enjoy the entertaining combat and quests.  But these fixes and additions do little to change the core problems with the game, including the combat and reward system, the inventory system, the journal, and the monumental repetition of simple tasks required throughout the game. This is the same game with the same convoluted dialogue system and the same towns and main quests. The Journal is still terrible. The fact that in a room with a bed you kneel in front of a fireplace to rest is just weird. The inventory management system has improved but is still unfriendly to the player. Having to press a key to collect each individual item dropped by every enemyﾗamounting to up to 50 items in a typical dropﾗis very annoying and tiresome. This ﾑone at a time' mentality crosses into shops as well where you need to identify, repair and sell items one at a time regardless of how many duplicates are in your inventory. But the worst offender is the constant enemy spawning and unbalanced reward system. While the combat is fun, getting swarmed by respawning mobs every 60 ﾖ 90 seconds over the course of a 60 hour game is not, especially when the enemy intelligence largely consists of "CHARGE!" The fundamental gameplay mechanic is to kill enemies to get advance points in order to increase attributes and get new skills to kill more enemies. There are no alternate solutions to quests, no possibility to use stealth or cleverness, just killing everything that moves and spawns. Further, there are enemies worth more advance points by themselves than every quest in the game combined! The ability to clear areasﾗor at least to have fewer and less populated spawnsﾗand substitute higher quest rewards would have gone a long way to making the game more balanced and broadly enjoyable. My original review score was fairly lenient. I balanced all of the problems against the entertainment players could get from the combat and dungeons and tilted the score in favor of the fun. Dungeon Lords Collector's Edition is even more entertaining that way than the original game, and is worth playing for fans of the genre. But while it represents pretty much the pinnacle of what the game has to offer, it is held back by the fundamental flaws of the game design. It can be characterized as an incremental upgrade over the latest patch, making it a poor value for those who already paid full price for the game once. Dungeon Lords Collector's Edition is a game that I recommend strongly to gamers who love the ﾑold school' style of verbose dialogue, endless ﾑhack-n-slash' combat, and don't mind repetitive tasks. If you can get past those things it's enjoyable, but not the ﾑultimate' version of the game expected when compared to the original release.  
The original review for Dungeon Lords described it as a ﾑratings gap' game, meaning that while the game was rated T for many good reasons it had a level of intensity and blood usually found in games with a M rating. The blood and combat are the only objectionable things in this game and the rest of the experience is tightly controlled, so that while the world is open to explore, the only trouble you can get into is battling dangerous monsters.
The interesting thing I found while re-evaluating the game was that it just isn't an interesting game for many kids approaching their teen years. I found this to be true for a couple of reasons. First, the sheer amount of dialogue is something that younger gamers usually don't tolerate. It isn't the content but rather the ponderous pacing that drives people away. Even more experienced gamers have issues with this. There are countless ﾑwhat do I do next' questions on Dungeon Lords forums that could have been avoided by simply reading the text of the dialogue. But when you ask a question and get a thousand word reply, it's difficult to force yourself to read every detail. The other reason that younger gamers may not dig it is the incessant enemy spawns. They're annoying and watching enemies spawn out of a brick wall is an immersion breaker. Many games have some enemy respawning to keep up tension, but as my older son watched me try to solve a challenging puzzle in a dungeon with enemies appearing every minute he described it as looking as fun as ﾑtrying to play chess while the dog walks on the board and tries to eat the pieces'. This review edited by Dave Long Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "dungeon lords" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Dungeon Lords: Collector's Edition |
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