Dungeon Hunter is a gorgeous, long and deep character building dungeon crawler from Gameloft who appears to be on a determined campaign to dominate every gaming genre on the Iphone by the end of the year.

  

The graphics and animations are superb in this ¾ top-down hack-and-cast with the nicely sized characters and creatures making it easy to view the twirling blades, lightning blasts, and fireballs of this graphical wonderland.  You’ll fight your way through a wide variety of locations including caves, graveyards, castles, forests, ruins and lava beds with so many quests it’s hard to keep count.  My guess is that it’s close to 40 including side quests that aren’t necessary to finish the story.  But you’ll probably want to complete them anyway just to experience everything this graphically rich game has to offer.

  

Even after you finish as one character, in my case the Warrior, you’ll be tempted to play through again as either a Rogue or Mage whose skills, attributes and abilities are significantly different so as to change the nature of play.  Although there are no difficulty settings to choose from, the Warrior is probably the easiest as his strength allows him to adorn the strongest armor while the fairies that accompany all the characters allows him to use their devastating magical attacks (the purple button) of lightning, fire, wind, earth and water alongside his own powerful weapon attacks.  The Rogue and Mage are more susceptible to damage so must rely on dexterity, deception and their defensive skills for their survival making them more of a challenge to play.

  

As in all RPG’s you’ll level up as you advance which gives you points to improve your strength, dexterity, endurance and energy but you’re also able to improve and add to your skill set which gives you special attacks like whirling blades (Warrior), invisibility (Rogue) and lightning attacks (Mage).  These skills can be offensive or defensive and are either passive (always on) or active (must be chosen).  The skills button is above the large attack button and can be rotated to offer one of three chosen active skills.  This rotation is a little awkward and I wished it were simply three buttons lined across even though this would clutter the screen a little. Each character class has 15 unique skills to unlock so playing through each character lets you play around with 45 different magical attacks, buffs and defensive illusions.

  

The item drops are plentiful. In fact, it becomes somewhat of a chore transmuting all the inferior items you pick up into gold even though the capacity of your inventory is quite large.  There is an auto-transmute option where you can automatically transmute non-magical or lower level magical items into gold. There is also an auto-equip option that  outfits you with your best equipment although I found this to be debatable.  While there are merchants in the towns, most of the best items seemed to come from monster drops.

The look of your character changes nicely depending upon what armor you choose to wear and what weapons you outfit but for some reason this doesn’t include your headwear.  Dungeon Hunter auto saves at the beginning of each level but you’re free to return to any location to build up your character.

  

In all Dungeon Hunter is a great 5* game.  It runs fast, handles well, looks beautiful, is exceptionally long (especially with three characters) and gives you a lot to plunder in a fantastic world. 



reviewed by goyami @ comcast.net