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Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground Review
Written by Justin Davis on Friday, June 29, 2007
Innovative dungeon creation & level-up systems. Very addictive "just one more" game design.
Combat is way too shallow. Grating music. Dungeon building slightly clunky.
When Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground arrived in the mail Friday afternoon I had no idea the game was going to turn me into such a flake that weekend. After all, lots of epic PSP and DS adventures cross my desk for review, but they don't make me blow off the plans I had with friends, or burn through an entire charged battery before I even realize a significant portion of time had passed. Yet by Sunday afternoon, that's exactly what had happened. My Dungeon Maker game clock had tallied an embarrassingly high number of hours played, and I was scheming ways to get more Dungeon Maker playtime in the following week, when I should have been taking care of other Modojo duties.
The game isn't for everyone. In fact, I'd guess that it isn't for most people. But for that small gamer subset that enjoys both hack n' slash titles like Diablo and creative, world-building sims like Viva Pinata, Dungeon Maker contains an almost irresistible appeal.
On the surface, the game follows the same basic flow of all dungeon crawlers. You'll stock up on MP and HP potions in town, dive into the dungeon to collect all the "phat lewt" dropped by enemies, and then return. Equip the newest, most powerful weapons and armor you find, selling off everything else. Repeat a few hundred times, diving ever deeper into the dungeon to face stronger enemies, who carry better items.
The hook here, as the name indicates, is that the gamer actually builds the dungeon themselves, instead of the floors being randomly generated, as they are in many dungeon crawlers. While in town gamers can purchase straight corridors, corners, forking paths, treasure rooms, and lots of other dungeon components. The dungeon itself starts out completely blank, and it's up to you to build out the twists and turns. You even determine where the boss room goes.
After the corridors and rooms have all been put into place, you can purchase various "skins," for your dungeon, which in turn determine which baddies will take up residence. If you leave your hallways as the default dirt floor, you'll only get wild beasts like dogs and bats moving in. But if you class them up a bit with wood, stone, or marble flooring, you might run into goblins, kobolds, or orcs your next time through. Half of Dungeon Maker's fun is this expirimentation. What kinds of enemies will a fruit tree or fountain bring in? By placing a chapel, will you attract the specific enemy you need to defeat for a quest?
The flow of the game makes it extremely difficult to stop playing. You start out the day in "town" (every shop and individual is just represented by a dropdown menu, with locations represented just by dots on a map), where you'll stock up on potions and other items, but most importantly, building materials for your ever-expanding dungeon. Once in the dungeon you'll clear out the areas you built before (which will now be crawling with mobs), then expand it further with all the parts you brought with you. Once back in town you sell off all your loot, eat your nightly meal (more on that in a moment), then go to sleep, which is your only opportunity to save. This pattern becomes addicting because it's very tempting to just make "one more" run into your dungeon to see what your new stone floor or guest bedroom has attracted.
The realtime combat itself is hands-down the game's major weakpoint. While it isn't downright offensive, it is a little too basic and boring for it's own good. You have a single button for a standard attack and another for a special attack. Mixing up which you press when can set off various canned combos, but they're all more-or-less the same. Magic is menu-driven, and is your standard thunder/water/fire spells. The various weapon-types (clubs, spears, swords) to behave differently, but not to the point that you'd want to keep multiple types of weapons around "just in case." You'll basically spend the whole game mashing "attack" over and over.
I also can't help but wish the dungeon creation controls were handled a little differently. While not as poor as the combat, it is a little annoying that rooms and corridors can only be laid one at a time, via a menu of all the possible architecture choices. It takes a lot longer to create a dungeon floor than it would necessarily have to take, if you had the ability to lay down rooms from a map-like interface.
It seems a little strange that I became so addicted to a hack n' slash title where the hacking and slashing itself wasn't really very enjoyable, but hey, I try not to overthink things when I'm having a good time with a game. The simple fact is, if the idea of building a dungeon tailor-made to lure in specific mobs, then rushing in and killing those mobs sounds appealing to you, then Dungeon Maker is most likely right up your alley. It's flawed, but I love it anyway.
