Dungeon Fighter or Dungeon & Fighter/Arad Senki in Korea and Japan respectively is a side scrolling beat' up game developed by Neople. There are six character classes in Dungeon Fighter and each class can specialize in one of several subclasses when they reach level 18. After that, they can still level up their characters up to level 48 where they can embark on an Awakening quest, gaining a new title which is essentially a better version of your subclass. Dungeon Fighter is Free 2 Play and is currently available in the USA and several Asian countries.

Requirements

• Windows 2000
• Pentium 3 800Mhz 
• 128MB RAM
• 5GB Free HDD space
• GeForce 4 MX 440 or equivalent graphics card
• Internet

Installation

To play Dungeon Fighter, you need to sign up for a Nexon Passport, don't worry it's free. After that you go download the client off their website. Now I should give this a perfect score since it was such a breeze to install it but Nexon installed Pando Media Booster without telling me. We all hate these kinds of 'extra' installs...I know I do and worst, Pando Media Booster takes up some of your bandwidth since it's a hybrid p2p of some sort. Now that to me is messed up, I just want to play the game without any strings attached.

 

First Impression

Unfortunately, in order to play Dungeon Fighter you have to go to their website first...now that sucks! Why...why do I need to open a browser to start a game? There's several workarounds floating in the internet but still...why are you doing this Nexon? I know this boosts up the website's popularity but at the cost of an extra step? In User Interface Design, the less steps are user should do, the better. This obviously is the exact opposite.

Anyway, on with my first impressions. As soon as the game starts, I noticed two things...first it's not using my default resolution - it's only using 640x480. Now for a lot of people, the game will probably look ugly when it's stretched out. But you know what I think? I still think it looks amazing, I mean there's just this nostalgic feeling that I'm playing an arcade game. So whatever floats your boat. Second, you won't be using your mouse a lot compared to the other games that you've played. This is old school keyboard action...get used to it. Don't worry the game will tell you (sometimes) when you will use your mouse i.e. talking to an NPC.

Once you're in-game you'll notice that almost everyone looks like you if they are a priest and the only way to differentiate yourself from the others is to buy some items from the Item Shop in order to change your character's appearance.

Moreover, Dungeon Fighter cut scenes are shown like a manga. Again, the nostalgic feeling of playing old school video games comes right back at you making you feel proud about your age (I miss the old days). No DX11 here.

Singleplayer

It took me a couple of minutes to get used to just using my keyboard, but as soon as I got used to it...I was in the zone. I just like to smash my keyboard keys to make a combo move (think Street Fighter). Oh and there's really no single-player part here since I consider this game as a MMORPG (that kicks ass). You can choose to play all by yourself though which is what I did the first few hours. You will however...interact eventually with another human being behind a monitor.

There's also the issue of SPAM. My god there's a lot of SPAM messages, I wish the developers could come up with a regex filter or something that will block all the websites that sell illegal items in-game. It's unbearable if you're in a town...all you see are SPAM messages scrolling really fast in your screen...your tiny screen.

Moreover, the background music is very...soothing. My favorites are gate.ogg, gate_new.ogg, and forest_town.ogg. I encourage everyone and I mean everyone! To listen to these three music files. They'll make you fall asleep or at least help you with your anger management problems. I don't know...I just don't hear these kinds of beats in Western music nowadays. I hear them a lot in KPOP though (and I love KPOP) - Nexon is a Korean Gaming Corporation by the way.

Multiplayer

For multi-player, you can either choose to play with other people (COOP) or against other people (PVP). I'll focus on COOP here because I got owned in PVP by more experienced players and I don't want to talk about how much I sucked. So anyway on with my COOP experience. Finding someone to party with you is a bit hard at first but just look out for people that speak your language! Eventually...you'll find someone that will talk to you and party with you - someone did for me (Hakeems)!

COOP is pretty much just like playing alone except you and your party or guild kill things faster. Just make sure that you know the other person, you don't want rare item drops to be stolen by your so called party members. For multi-player games like Dungeon Fighter where there's a lot of players, having able to create a guild is a big plus in terms of replayability. I mean it just increased it by ten fold or more.

Final Thoughts

This game is definitely for both the casual gamer and hardcore gamer. It runs well on a Netbook too! As of the time of this writing, I'm encouraging all of my friends to download and play this game so I can make a guild! See? I told you guilds are a big plus in a game. Everyone wants to create a guild in an MMORPG like this! I guess the only downsides for this game are the extra application that gets installed in your computer (without your knowledge since there's no pop-up dialog to cancel it) and the excessive SPAM that you get from websites selling illegal items in-game.

Dungeon Fighter may not look awesome at first glance but it's highly addictive. You won't feel that you have to grind your way the first few levels in the game and even if you do later in the game, you'll probably have a couple of friends that you can call to play with you or you're in a guild where you guys grind together.

Ratings

Installer - No one likes extra applications being installed without any notice whatsoever.

Graphics - It might notup to today's standards especially with the maximum resolution but the gameplay more than makes up for it.

Sound - All the bam!, kappow!, and boom! sound effects I'd expect for a beat' up game are present. Now add the background music...perfecto.

Gameplay - Just like most beat' up games you can play alone or you can choose to party with a couple of people later on (which you'll probably need to). Replayability just went from 10 to over 9000 because of the ability to create guilds which makes the game a lot more fun to play with especially with friends and not just some random guild that you choose to join. What's the overall verdict? This game's a keeper.