Dungeon Runners Review

People will try anything if it's free. Mini bottles of mouthwash, tiny tins of shoe wax, single-serving bananas--millions are spent every year by companies attempting to hook consumers with a free sample of their latest brands. Adopting that same strategy, the developers at NCsoft have referred to Dungeon Runners as an experiment in game design. Adhering to the scientific method, we begin with their assumed question: Will gamers still become addicted to the fashionable quest-based MMORPG gameplay if it is pared down in scope, yet provided easily and on the cheap? Evidently, NCsoft has hypothesized that they will. The real question you will have to ask yourself is, are you a Cheese Wiz man, or a fan of Brie? Would you rather take the bus, or drive a Ferrari? Soup, or steak? Salvation Army, or Armani?

The idea of even reviewing a free game might appear to be futile at first blush. After all, is someone's free time so precious that he or she cannot spend a few minutes to simply give the game a go? What's next, a review of Yahoo! Chess? An insightful critique of solitaire? The answer to this question is that Dungeon Runners is not as free as it sounds. Imagine this scenario: Eagerly anticipating a nifty piece of armor while fighting a boss, you finally see a big item drop after the monster lies slain. Hovering over the description, your eyes widen as the list of killer attributes runs on, until you notice the binding clause, "Membership Only." Like a woman at the gates of Augusta National, you are harshly denied satisfaction. The bottom line is that most of the better items in the game are restricted to users who pay $5 a month for a membership, which also includes access to an item bank, provides login queue priority, and allows you to use stackable potions. Taking these obvious benefits into consideration, many prospective players will more than likely consider Dungeon Runners a practical contender for their money rather than simply a free distraction. Dungeon Runners runs on several game servers, each carrying a fairly low beta population. Characters exist on a central database, and can be used on any available server. The game offers players the choice of three basic classes: Fighter, Mage, or Ranger. A classless system was recently introduced, wherein each class can now train each other's skills, allowing for endless hybrid permutations. After designing the look of a character with a rudimentary creation tool, players can congregate in a moderately sized town, accessing nearby instanced dungeons in order to level their characters and reap the spoils of combat. Quests given out by NPCs are your standard scavenger hunts, assigning you missions to kill monsters or collect objects with the reward of extra treasure. This treasure can be spent on skills, which are sold by trainers in the same way items are sold by merchants. Special coins known as "King's Coins" can be found and spent at special merchants to receive powerful items instantly. Treasure chests are also typically found scattered amongst the cul-de-sacs of each dungeon, surprising players with random hand-outs. The dungeons themselves are randomly generated, which would be a welcome improvement to the genre if they were not so plain in design. Monsters wait in clusters of three or four at mathematical intervals, occasionally swarming in droves. Named bosses are usually accompanied by several henchmen and can prove to be challenging to defeat, but the strategy involved in such a fight is minimal. Organized groups can be formed to tackle harder instances, which, while generally more interesting than the lower level offerings, lack many memorable characters or elaborate encounters. Despite the predictable design, it is easy to admire the spirit of NCsoft's venture. Promising an inexpensive, lighthearted return to the basics of dungeon crawling, Runners' strongest selling point is its sense of humor. A piece of armor found in a treasure chest is called a "Spiney Rusty Scale Spaulders of the Penguin," apparently poking fun at the naming conventions found in games such as World of Warcraft or Diablo. Weapon classes range from cardboard axes to pizza cutters, and can feature absurd references such as "ludicrous speed" as attributes. Player names now come with automatically generated titles, such as "Invigorated Lowly Fanatical Fighter." NPCs spout amusing dialogue in the vein of characters from Blizzard games, although the sound quality has a slight reverberation to it as if it were recorded in somebody's basement (perhaps after the team's nightly Warcraft raid?). Speaking of which, for journeyman MMO players, your first foray into the game world may feel slightly familiar. For a moment, try to convince yourself that you are, in fact, not playing a beta version of World of Warcraft, circa 2002. Ignore the bright yellow exclamation points that dot the countryside, hovering over the throngs of NPCs. Turn your gaze from the cartoony characters that carry towering swords and wear colorful, oversized armor, as they march into the swirling portals that demarcate instanced dungeons. Erase from your mind the idea that the loading screen and user interface scream out as exhibit A and B in an infringement case. Sleep. Sleep... _PAGE_BREAK_ Even though its influences may be irrelevant (at this point, studios can hardly be blamed for borrowing at least a few ideas from the already heavily-influenced Warcraft), Dungeon Runners does not present a pretty picture. Even at the maximum graphical settings, an oppressively solid wall of blue or green fog will often stand just on the periphery of the foreground, as if you are watching a video game play out on the set of a Star Wars movie. Surprisingly, when one steps back to examine the landscape, the game barely resembles the popular title from which it borrows so heavily. Dungeon Runners' visual aesthetic comes off like an amateur painter attempting to copy a Picasso and ending up with a Kinkade. After all, even street artists will charge more than five bucks. At first, most players will naturally attempt to control the game using the standard WASD keyboard and mouse combination. However, rather than allowing the player to move the characters themselves with the keyboard, the keys will rotate the camera instead. The character then follows the camera automatically, resulting in a significant delay between the press of a key and the movement of the character. With this arrangement proving to be beyond frustrating, the simplest method of control is reduced to the point-and-click command scheme akin to that of the Diablo series. Delay is still evident, but is less bothersome than with the unresponsive keyboard. Also as in Diablo, characters seem to move on an isometric plane, snapping to a grid as they turn. While this isn't the most offensive quirk, it turns out that spell casting is made all the more difficult because of it. Even when clearly clicking on a monster to cast a spell, fireballs will often fly off in the wrong direction due to the game's finicky, direction-based targeting, leading to many frustratingly needless deaths. At the root of the control issue is the fact that Dungeon Runners began its life as an entirely different project, known at the time as Exarch. As NCsoft developer Stephen Nichols explains in a message board post, "Exarch was an RTS game. As such, the core of the engine is based on the idea of a synchronized simulation. ...So, when you click, the message to click goes up to the server and has to be reflected back to you (and everyone else nearby) before any movement can take place." In this context the control problems become understandable, but not excusable. As a product of flaws in the engine itself, the controls seem unlikely to be fixed in the near future, and thus remain a heavily crippled component. None of these issues would be as significant if the actual gameplay were enjoyable enough. The developers promise many updates and content expansions in the future, such as players vs. player combat, and the addition of a guild system. As it stands, however, Dungeon Runners is unable to offer much beyond stale, repetitive action. No matter the class you choose, your time spent in the game will be exclusively devoted to repeatedly clicking on the same uninspired monsters, occasionally casting a spell or two. Lacking a truly massive world to play in, there is little joy to be found in exploration. Without a system of trade, or even a way to compare items with other players, the acquisition of treasure almost becomes a laboriously necessary affair. In addition to all of these concerns, network lag frequently rendered the game unplayable even while encountering low ping times and smooth connections to other online games around the same period. A quick glance at the official Dungeon Runners forums revealed similar complaints. Your mileage may vary. In addition to the issue of loot restrictions, there is another factor to consider when calculating the cost of Dungeon Runners: Time is not cheap. Investing in free time is something about which gamers know quite a lot, especially when it comes to the prolonged demands of leveling a character. Those who already pay a monthly fee to play a full-featured MMO will need to decide whether the drastic decrease in quality is worth the financial savings. Dungeon Runners may work as a kind of gateway drug for those new to MMO gameplay, but these players should ultimately look elsewhere for a more rousing introduction to the genre. Dungeon Runners reminds me of a comedian who tells a joke that everyone has heard before. You may not remember where you first heard it until later, after the comedian has already toured the country and won his own Comedy Central special. In that way, Dungeon Runners is a lot like Carlos Mencia. Even after learning that he often steals his jokes, some people still watch and enjoy his comedy, unaffected by the knowledge. Unfortunately, much like Carlos, Dungeon Runners is not worth your time either way. It is, quite simply, a failed experiment.