Dungeon Defenders is a great take on the tower defense genre, I really enjoy playing it. I bought it on iPod (And it was a terrible experience all over) and waited maybe one year then I bought it on Xbox360 (Split-Screen Coop is not great and the griefing options were many) then on PC with all of my friends. Dungeon Defenders mixes action-rpg with loot mechanics and tower defense systems to create a nifty little game with some flaws that I'm going to look at in the following article.
I've been playing a ton of Cook Serve Delicious over the past two weeks and boy is it fun. In its most simplistic form, Cook Serve Delicious (Henceforth referred to as CSD) is a stressful microgame collection glued to a restaurant management sim game. It's also very indie, not sold on steam yet and programmed in Game Maker, I suppose that taking a look at smaller games should be made with a more forgiving mind, but the ideas and designs can still be judged on the same level.
Writing one of these looks at Borderlands 2 is quite difficult because while I had good things to say about torchlight 2, the best part of that look is to think about ideas to improve the game and its systems. Borderlands 2 is big, complex, well-crafted and polished, but not without minor flaws. Taking terrible games and suggesting ways to make them less so is easy, taking great games and having to scratch your head on how to refine some systems here and there can be tough, but doable. No game is perfect for everyone but I don't want to be seen as nit picky; I'm offering the view of what I think is flawed in these games I take a good look at. Don't get me wrong, for me to play that much, the game has to have something!
The original Torchlight took most of its ideas from Blizzard’s Diablo 2 and Torchlight 2 follows the same pattern. It would have been interesting to see where Runic’s title splits apart from the craft of similar games, but barring really neat ideas, some mechanics and systems just don’t cut it to make a deep action RPG. Seeing the promises of mod tools makes me think that it would be possible to tweak Torchlight 2 and see if my ideas hold up.