iPhone App: Dungeon Hunter

December 2nd, 2009

= 5 stars

Kill or be killed in this adventure role playing game.

The Good

• Derivative in the best way of the excellent Diablo games: your character is shown in 3/4 view, and the vast majority of action happens on screen. The only times you leave the main screen are between levels, buying items, and equipping your character. Even conversations with other characters happens within cartoony text blocks at the screen bottom.
• Great controls: a D-pad on the left for movement and buttons on the right (my favorite). The buttons include an action button (attacking creatures, opening chests, and starting a conversation), plus magic and special attack buttons that get more complex as you gain more skills. The game overall is very responsive.
• Solid graphics with a notable attention to detail: monsters and treasure have bright colors to stand apart from the background, treasure leaps out of chests, you can see the stuff your character is wielding as he runs about, and your special attacks (enabled by friendly fairies that accompany you) really do look special.
• Some nice touches to speed along gameplay: You can enter any previously-explored area from a “world map” (so you don’t have to spend time retracing your steps through a level you’ve already seen), an “auto equip” which instantly calls up all the best stuff in your inventory, and a pretty cool character menu (tap your character’s face in the upper left corner) that lists everything about your character on several tabs.
• After just a few quests involving raiding a bandit’s lair and killing a poisonous slime in the town well, I was hooked. I already know I’ll play this one to the end.

The Bad

• Encountered a few crashes and one instance where none of the controls appeared.
• Takes a while to load new levels. It’s big, in total 226MB.

Conclusion

In an earlier review, I held off giving the similar questing game Ravensword five stars because I felt there was probably a better such game out there. Well, I think Dungeon Hunter is it. I loved playing the Diablo games on the Mac, and Dungeon Hunter is essentially Diablo on the iPhone. It’s great fun, the bar has been raised (iPhone apps just keep getting better), and I need to go kill some monsters to level up.

iTunes App Store Link (Dungeon Hunter Free):
iTunes App Store Link (Dungeon Hunter):