Dungeon Hunter: Alliance is downloadable title available from the PSN Store developed by Gameloft. The game takes us back to the glory days of the old-fashioned RPG.
You play a king that has reawakened from his death 25 years later to team up with a group of fairies to save the world from the evil queen. Dungeon Hunter: Alliance allows you to play with up to 3 friends online and offline with a slightly closer camera than the usual top-down based game.
Is Dungeon Hunter: Alliance a game that old-school RPG fans will like? Let’s find out as we take a look at the HOTs and NOTs.
HOT
Storyline
After first getting into the game, I was a bit skeptical about the storyline as you wake up 25 years after being dead in the middle of a huge tomb, with no real explanation as to why. But as the story unfolds, you begin to learn more about the lands and who you are – making you want to push on through and find out more. Although it is a little disappointing that there are no voice-overs used in the game. The story is very strong and is playable more than once due to the various locations and environments.
Character Development
There are 3 main character types within Dungeon Hunter: Alliance: Fighter, Mage or Rogue each having there own special abilities. Each character has 4 main attributes which you choose to skill when you level-up according to armor and weapons that you choose to wield throughout the game. Which is a personal preference as i enjoy being able to skill up and aim for certain skills and objects.
Multiplayer
Dungeon Hunter: Alliance does stand by itself on single player mode but I would strongly recommend playing it through with a friend. Playing it alone the bosses can be really tough but when you work as a team, the game becomes more tactical in working together to kill various baddies. You can also join random games with a fairly solid number of servers that are available.
Graphics
From watching the trailer before playing the game, my overall expectations were low including the graphics, however once you get out of the first dungeon you begin to notice just how much detail has been put into the environment. Visually it is really pleasing to explore although it doesn’t hit a new bench mark for the graphical capability it certainly is a very artistically interesting game.
NOT
Controls
For the first few missions it took a while to get used to the control system. This is thanks to how difficult it is to set up various attacks to different buttons and how to use you skill points once you level up. It holds you back for a bit but once you have got your head around it becomes fairly simple within time.
Goals
Between various missions sometimes you get a little lost with no clear direction of where to go or what to do which does become stressful after a while. Although this is a pain it does give you the feel of an old-school RPG
Customizing
Upon starting the game there are 3 main characters to choose from however you can only change the characters name. There is no choice of gender, color alteration or even a choice of preset look-sets. Again this isn’t a huge problem for long as the character is fairly small on the screen and does change when your purchase or find new armor but we are still stuck with generic colors for each armor set.
Loading
The main thing that disappointed me about this game was the loading time between each area. The areas themselves aren’t very big and the game itself is installed onto your hard drive you would think with this in mind that it would take a few seconds in between each area.
VERDICT
Dungeon Hunter: Alliance is a very enjoyable game bringing old games such as Zelda in my eyes back to where they should be in there original form with an advancement of graphics and interface. The single player and multi-player both hold themselves, I would strongly recommend playing this with friends to bring more variation to the gameplay. This game is definitely worth a playthrough for those of you who miss the way RPGs used to be.
[Editor’s Note: Dungeon Hunter: Alliance was reviewed on the PlayStation 3 platform. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]