‘Maximalist’ is a good word to use to describe Trendy Entertainment‘s action/tower defense hybrid Dungeon Defenders. Lots of levels, lots of monsters, lots of stats, huge numbers, mountains of loot, options out the wazoo and more over-bloomed neon colored lighting than you’ve ever seen before. The bigness extends beyond the core design, too, with sweeping rebalances in patches and heaps of content-filled DLC already bulking the game out further. But does all this extra baggage make for a compelling co-op tower-defense experience, though? Read on and find out.

Trendy Entertainment are savvy operators, that’s for sure. Originally shown off as a UDK showcase demo, Dungeon Defense has grown and grown, changed name and spread onto just about every platform going; PC, 360, PS3, iDevices and even Android now offer this Unreal 3-engined hybrid of third person hack n’ slash lootfest, tower defense and MMO-lite. This review is of the PC version, but by all accounts the game is functionally identical across all builds, although the interface is very cluttered for handheld users. The design ethos on show here seems to be ‘everything and the kitchen sink’. Diablo-like loot, RPG-style persistent character growth and leveling, enormous swarms of enemies and a heavy focus on physics-based traps to keep the monsters at bay. It’s an ambitious mix, but it’s perhaps not entirely the sum of its parts.

Taken as just a solo tower defense game, Dungeon Defenders can seem a little simple, and simultaneously overcomplicated. With only a very limited number of towers available, many of the levels seem more like exercises in maths than tactics, especially as enemies often approach from four directions at once and pay no heed to attempts to ‘maze’ them. Character-level combat is largely a matter of closing to your ideal range and holding the left mouse button until enemies are sufficiently murdered/weakened to be finished by your towers.

The initial 12 levels might also seem a little on the short side, although each offers four difficulty levels (often with their own unique rewards), an alternative challenge-mode variant, an endurance survival mode, and a Pure Strategy mode where you have to rely entirely on tower placement. Recent DLC has bulked out the number of stages quite significantly, and a few of the packs (on the PC, at least) have even been free, so there’s a lot of raw content here. Modding is supported as well, to the impressive extent of all the game resources being completely accessible for users to even use in spinoff fan-projects, so long as they’re non-profit productions.

Back in my review of Serious Sam 3, I praised the game for its sense of escalation. Each level threw more at the player, but only after preparing them with the appropriate tools for the job, and the knowledge to handle their enemies by slowly introducing foes and the ideal methods to deal with them. While Dungeon Defenders quickly escalates, it does so in a chaotic and haphazard way. Depending on which class you pick, some are almost impossible to start out solo without grinding, as you don’t get your full arsenal of tools (5 unique towers and two special abilities per class) until you hit level 15-20. It’s not unusual to hit a brick wall such as a boss that your best towers all combined can’t put a dent in, forcing you to grind a couple more levels to expand your resources and give yourself the option to upgrade your towers further.

Most of my grumbles so far either evaporate or are significantly lessened by playing co-operatively, especially once you’re past the initial levelling curve required to get all your class abilities. The game offers both local co-op with up to three other players in split-screen format (360 controllers natively supported for plug n’ play action), or online play in both moderated (akin to Diablo 2′s Battle.net implementation) and unmoderated formats, the latter allowing offline characters and mods to be used, although also at the risk of encountering cheaters and hacked characters. The multiplayer framework is remarkably comprehensive, too, mirroring Battle.net in a lot of ways, but storing character data server-side for additional security.

Once you’re online or get split-screen fully set up, the game properly starts to shine. Once you have a range of classes on the field, with each one being able to contribute their unique towers and abilities to the chaos it’s much easier to cope with the threats that get thrown your way, and can whittle down or cheese your way through some things that would be excessive for your level. Despite things being more manageable in multiplayer, the game still remains inevitably chaotic – even more so, as there’s four times as many cartoon munchkins dashing around, spraying particle effects and hoarding loot. The sheer number of enemies (hitting the triple digits per wave by the second level), and their relative size compared to the player characters feels utterly overwhelming at times.

Not to say that Dungeon Defenders is a bad game. Far from it – when you’ve got everything set up right, with one of each class and a stage appropriate to your shared character levels, it really shines and provides plenty of memorable monster-mashing moments. Played with random internet folks invites a wave of potential frustrations, with the min-maxing oriented stat n’ loot heavy gameplay inviting the worst of MMO mindsets from the community. As something played with a few friends – local or otherwise – willing to laugh off defeats rather than hurl abuse, it really does offer a lot of entertaining group slaying and strategerizing.

I’ve barely even touched on the smaller elements that crop up later, such as a pet system where each character can have a permanent stat-buffing and monster-fighting minion flying over their shoulder, and the MMO-esque store system, where you can sell unwanted rare gear by idling your character online, letting players visit you and buy items for the prices you set. A recent DLC pack also introduced four gender-swapped protagonists, each with two unique skills of their own, although with their tower loadouts shared with their original counterparts while further DLC looks to add yet more levels and options to the mix.

The active update schedule is – like almost everything else in this game – a double-edged sword. While new content and gear are nearly constantly added, there’s also no shortage of community dissatisfaction with sweeping nerfs and buffs thrown almost arbitrarily at the various classes, towers, powers and even enemy stats. I suppose this is the inevitable negative of the remarkably complex MMORPG-lite framework that the game is draped over, where different stages have recommended level ranges, and an underlevelled or underequipped character can die in seconds.

While difficulty spikes and weird stats occasionally cause problems, the sense of progression and empowerment when you are getting bigger, better and more powerfully equipped is compelling stuff and familiar to anyone who has ever gotten hooked on dungeon crawling. In combat, the game even handily highlights loot items that would be a direct upgrade over your current gear, letting you gear up on the go via a quick-equip key, or put them into your persistent character inventory for selling or upgrading later.

As much as I might grumble, I don’t dislike Dungeon Defenders. It’s a mixed bag for sure, but it’s an enormous Bag of Stuff(tm), overflowing with ideas. Some work, some don’t, some are conditional and can either provide fascinating layers of depth or just clutter and obfuscate. As a co-op game, it can be a ton of fun, although if you’re looking for something without the MMO-esque grind and eternal hunt for bigger gear, Sanctum might be a more restrained alternative. As a single-player experience, I’d recommend the tighter and more focused Orcs Must Die over this, which is more conservative in it’s design, but does more with each of its own disparate elements. If the mixture of light action, number-crunching tower-defense and co-op RPG hack n’ slashery appeals to you, Dungeon Defenders may be the game for you, although it might be worth holding out for its inevitable next major discount in the upcoming Steam winter sale, given the added cost of the growing hoard of DLC.

[Dungeon Defenders]

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