Dungeon Legends Review

"I call out to all brave warriors who deem themselves worthy to defeat me! I am the god of steel, sand and fire, and you're the scourge I am to rid this Earth of! You shall witness my glory! I am invincible!". Such a ceremonious provocation was sure to lure some contenders into the arena and fight me. I tap on 'send', and off it goes to the general chat, making itself visible for dozens of players.

I confess my presumptuous call out bore some further motives than just loathsome self-glorification. It was the quickest way to seek out a high-level player, and ask about my prospectives in this game. Needless to say, a player three times my level heeded my call, so we leaped into the arena and he courteously swept the sand with my dwarven arse, and did so effortlessly. But I surely gained valuable insight. Much of it I was suspecting: commitment, occasional payments, grinding and boredom would be some of the things I'd have to endure while playing this game.

Dungeon Legends takes the shape of a dungeon-crawler for iOS, with isometric perspective and a simplified version of the abilities-based combat seen in Diablo or MOBAs of the likes of Dota 2. You start off in the flesh of a hairy dwarf, and progressively make your way through the seemingly endless amount of dungeon levels, gaining gold, experience points and collecting all those sweet treats that any dungeon-crawling aficionado is sure to come across whilst fending off goblins and skeletons.

And here's where this game started working against me. Tapping the screen is quite a poor method of controlling your character, as it means different things depending on the exact spot you tap on the screen. Attacking, moving, using abilities, etc.; all is relegated to a tap of your finger, which is made all the more frustrating by the constant camera movement, glued to the character and in no way manipulable - I assume it was locked on top of your character in order to simplify controls, however dysfunctionally.

As you tap on chests, skeletons and dungeon tiles, you will be able to gather experience and level up, which will progressively give you access to new abilities and level-capped weapons and armer. The thrill of better stats, am I right? Of course, new abilities are always something to be excited about, as they usually allow you to specialise and tailor your character to, let's say, the evil wizard you always hoped it would become. But not in Dungeon Legends, where all dwarves ultimately share the same abilities and indistinguishable armour. Mine may wield a hammer, and yours an axe, but that's as far as customisation goes.

We're talking here about an MMO-based game with an RPG-style level-up system, not your run-of-the-mill offline linear adventure, I should remind you. Dungeon Legends is what you have if you choose an archetypal dwarf at the beginning of a game like Dragon Age: Origins and force every player to only play with it. And I'm doing a great disservice to Dragon Age by even mentioning it in this review, as Dungeon Legends lacks depth in mechanics and story, being as shallow as a puddle. And a puddle very much about to dry.

Whilst completing these dungeon escapades, arena combats against other players, or clan challenges, you can also accrue gold. But you don't purchase items with gold. At least not with this sort, but with actual money. With the first kind of gold you are able to improve weapons and stats, like Dexterity, which have as a detailed description as "increases the damage of some of your skills". Every time you do so, which will be a fair lot, you'll be forced to wait up to 20 minutes to see the results, unless you chip in some gems to speed up this process. These gems, of course, will have to be bought with your real money, at an extortionate price.

And here's where the main condemnable practice lays. Pay-to-win systems like this one transform a potentially blossoming free-to-play sector into one hosting people with money and making them the vile and wilful adjudicators of every game. In order to keep you hooked onto the monetised system, invasive and clickbait-y notifications pop up when your lives are replenished, or some nonexistent randomer challenges you, or even encouraging you to become a legend and face the dungeons! If you don't cash out, you sift out between waiting five minutes watching your Dexterity bar slowly go up - the rest of the game being completely locked meanwhile -, or watching an immersion-breaking thirty-second commercial about another equally malpracticing game.

All in all, there's barely any redemption in a game that gets a kick out of squeezing every last penny out of you. Dungeon levels are wearisome due to uninteresting environments, dull-as-dishwater objective design, overly simplistic mechanics and repetitious enemies, overall making each depth redundant and the game long-winded. Dungeon Levels embodies every reprehensible trend that's appeared since the dawn of mobile gaming. Even dwarves would be shocked with this legendary monster.