Dungeon Lords Review
Sia 'Garrett' Manzari, 2005-07-09

A lot has been written about Dungeon Lords lately. First, between january and march 2005 the previews kept coming in, all of them being quite enthusiatic or at least very positive. Then, Bradley's latest was released and the first negative opinions arouse, and now, after more than two months, the game and its makers are being flamed to the max and barely a review makes it up to 50% anymore! Dungeon Lords has been compared to games like Gothic or Morrowind, maybe even Arx Fatalis, and it has all the potential to live up to this comparison, but it was rushed out the street, having been quite unfinished, unpolished and missing a lot of promised features when it hit the streets. But unlike many of my fellow editors I still enjoyed the game. Why? Read on...

The intro tells you of a conflict between two mages, a pending war in Lord Davenmore's realm and the love of the princess Ellowyn to Valdane while her father Davenmore promised her to Lord Barrowgrim to smooth the waves of war. So it's just the classic cliche fantasy background story, as good or as bad as in any other RPG. Then you are taken to the character creation process.

Character Creation
Character creation goes off hand easily. While in the retail version and also after patch 1.3 the optical customization is compeltely disabled, this is nothing we should really mourn, as we see our alter ego from behind only anyway and with a helmet most of the times. You pick your race and gender and then distribute your points and pick your heraldy.
The RPG System is very well designed, as one can expect from a veteran as DW Bradley - still it is cut down a little compared to his former titles. Only 4 attributes are available, but then there's many skills and class promotions to be played through, which we do right after the character creation.

Lift Off
The first thing that meets the eye, is the beautiful plants and trees, that are moving with the wind. Looks very nice, but is quite hardware consuming also. And after you get your first quest, you take a walk to the gates of Fargrove, which you find closed as Lord Davenmor's daughter Ellowyn is missing. So you need to use a dungeon to enter Fargrove: The Fargrove sewers. And immediately you know why the game is called Dungeon Lords - because the dungeons are really great. Greatly designed, greatly shaped, nice puzzles, smart enemies...Dungeons rule over the world with the lifeless cities (Arindale), empty huts (Skuldoon) and almost no furniture or guests in shops and tavers - one can't help and think, the game could have needed another 4 months of optimizing these aspects only.
But the dungeons, I tell you again, the dungeons are really worth bearing the upper world.

Combat
As D.W. Bradley announced Dungeon Lords as a Fighting RPG, fights are a very strong aspect naturally - however enemies in the upper world are a little stupid compared to those who live in the dungeons...they get stuck behind rocks or cannot follow you when you walk up stairs...but then again, DL is not an easy game regarding combat, so you may be happy for these AI cutdowns. Combat animations, esp of your hero, are very nice also - with several tyopes of attacks weach put into scene realistic and nice! Combat itself is extremely well done, but it requires some time to get used to it, requires a lot of training by the player and requires developing new strategies for new enemies...obviously something, that most gamers can't live up to these days, but scream out loud and complain about the bad combat system.

The world itself is haunted by the annoying idea of monster respawning, which you can minimize in the main menu, but never disable it. Whoever thinks monster respawning is fun for anyone needs to think again for it is not fun at all, but annyoing! CRPGamers want to clean out areas, not be forced to fight in them over and over again. And this is exactly, what you have to do, because the story takes you to through the large gaming world several times and before the automap was added in patch 1.3 you were wandering around aimlessly at times, crossing the same paths over and over again, looking for quest items or characters and fighting the same monsters over and over again...well, as indicated, that should be better now with the automap added!
And after each combat you survive, there is character advancement (if you don't survive, revive yourself , but loose all your current unspent XPs).

Character Advancement
Character advancement is a very nice aspect in Dungeon Lords, highly motivating, as you can distribute your experience points at once without having to wait for a level up. You can join guilds also to further specialize your character or to get a completely different kind of feat compared to your initial character. As said very nicely done and highly motivating!

The World
You can furthermore use the different schools of magic and summon creatures, unlock chests (which is very nicely done as well, challenging your wits and reaction, but also bound to the characters skill level), you find a lot of items and everything you equip is immediately visible on you character.

On the downside, the world could have needed a few more different terrain types as there's only forests, swamps, mountains and seas...there could have been snowy areas, jungles or at least forests with different kinds of trees and vegetation.

One word reg the automap: Beautiful! The automaps delivered in patch 1.3 are among the most beautfil maps I have ever seen in a RPG. Needless to say, that a lot of flaming could have been avoided if they had been added with version 1.

The Main Story
The main story develops neat, while it is nothing new or spectacular as mentioned before, it is presented nicely and has a few surprises in the end. Quest log is a little too short and once quests have been solved, they are gone and nowhere to be found again...which may have been useful on some occasions, but is mothing annoying really on the other side. Next to the main story, there are no side quests at all, but only the class promotion quests and one special quest for each guild between the first and second promotion (which, you may say, is a side quest...so there are a total of two side quests if you want to put it that way).

Where is the music???
Let's take a look to the audio section: The voice acting is quite ok in the English version, but it is fantatic in the German version, as dtp did a great job once more, hiring the German voice actors of Angelina Jolie, Charles Bronson, Kirk Douglay and Burt Reynolds and have them dub every single line in the game!

What does really annoy me to the max as a music lover is the missing background music! No background music! Can you believe that???
Especially with the nice install and main menu music I would have loved to play the game with music - would have added so much more atmosphere!

Strangely enough, there seems to be music for the game, go to the official English site and click through the menus - there are different tunes playing in the flash site, which, I am quite sure, were written for the game, as they would fit perfectly to a tavern or the House of the Tiger for example. And as both Dreamcatcher and dtp never really answered anything of my numerous mails regarding the missing music (except that there most likely won't be a patch adding music), one can only assume that it was technical problems that made the developers remove the music again (also the german press book by dtp speaks of background music - of epic music like in Lord of the Rings, to be specific, another hint, that I am right with my guess).

But I am drifting apart...back to audio again. What's left is the effects, which seem to be quite nice, but you only really hear them, when you are zoome fully up to your character - when you zoom out to have a better overview over the world, they become lower and lower until they are gone *shrugs*

In the End
In the end Dungeon Lords is a fun game for anyone, who can stand from jumping on the flaming train but enjoy the pros of the game - which seems quite hard for most people these days, as complaining is very sexy in our world. It could have been a 90% hit title with probably another 6 months of developing however - sad thing it was released too early.