Dungeon Lords MMXII Review
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Along with combat, you also have to explore several major dungeons. The dungeons are fun, and you have to deal with traps, puzzles, action sequences, and secret rooms -- not to mention tons of enemies -- as you make your way through them. Each dungeon also has a unique look and feel. Unlike some modern games, Heuristic Park didn't do any cutting and pasting with their creations.Finally, Dungeon Lords also includes numerous quests, but they're pretty basic. You're mostly just tasked with fetching something, delivering something, or (more than likely) killing something. This is an area where MMXII could have easily improved upon the original versions of the game but didn't. Even the new classes didn't receive new ascension quests. Heuristic Park just re-used old quests, and sometimes they didn't even bother to change the names, and so the Dragonlord's ascension quest is called the Shaolei Master's Quest.
Bugs and Other Issues
Let me start with the good news here. The original versions of Dungeon Lords had bugs in them that could prevent you from completing the game. In the original Dungeon Lords, sometimes the gate leading out of the starting city wouldn't open, preventing you from seeing about 90% of the game, and even in the CE, the Shadow Ruins were broken, and if you left that area before collecting the Relic of Power, then there wasn't any way to get back inside, and your game was broken. As far as I'm aware, no bugs like that exist in MMXII. The MMXII bugs are just irritations.
At first when MMXII came out, I was optimistic. Within a week of its release, a patch came out with a useful fix (originally there wasn't a hotkey for opening your inventory bags, and the patch added one). But since then it's been radio silence, even though there are obvious problems with easy solutions.
So what's currently wrong? None of the skills or spells have descriptions, making it difficult to tell what they do. Weapons along with armor can be damaged, but weapons lose durability so fast that there isn't any way to keep them repaired (there's a repair skill, but for some reason repair kits are rare drops, and so the skill is almost worthless). Once you pick up a Crystal of Life (which happens early in the game) death no longer has a penalty. There isn't any way to advance time, so sometimes you're forced to explore in the dark. It's possible for high level characters to lose the ability to learn new spells. The game is sloppy with quest items, and you can lose half of your inventory space to them. The game automatically decides whether you should use a ranged or melee weapon, but this process is a disaster, and it probably means you won't equip a ranged weapon. The manual wasn't updated properly, and half of its information refers to the original game and is no longer relevant.
But probably the biggest issue with MMXII is that it is disturbingly easy. The main failing here is that Heuristic Park added a bunch of new random equipment -- including uncommon (green), rare (blue), and epic (purple) items -- which allow characters to become much more powerful than they were before, but the enemies weren't changed at all, and so most battles are now mismatches. After completing the game, I went back to a thread in our forums where people posted their stats after completing the original game, and the differences were staggering. Among other things, my character had about 30 (!) times as much health and three times as much armor. Heuristic Park desperately needs to re-balance the game.
Conclusion
After playing through MMXII a couple of times, I went back and played the CE for a while, just to make sure I wasn't looking back at it with rose-colored glasses. I wasn't, at least not completely. Every version of Dungeon Lords has had issues, but the CE was the culmination of three patches, and it remains the best. MMXII looks like it wasn't playtested at all, and it could use three patches of its own. There isn't any way I can recommend MMXII at $15 when you can buy the CE for $6.
