Content Sections Xbox Games Xbox Hardware Xbox Community Xtras If there are two genres designed to take your money, they'd be beat 'em ups and free-to-play MMOs. Beat 'em ups lingered in arcades and convenience stores across America, and were content to suck quarters out of your pockets like they were doing their best impression of a playground bully. Free-to-play MMOs are just as militant about stealing your money, and more criminally, your time. Dungeon Fighter Live pulls off the difficult and special trick of combining the very worst parts of both genres to make something even less than the sum of its parts.
Dungeon Fighter Live is an original XBLA title based on the bafflingly popular free-to-play MMO by Nexon. The eponymous Dungeon Fighters clear out maps populated with various goblins, minotaurs and other standard fantasy trappings in a side scrolling beat 'em format akin to Final Fight or Streets of Rage. Enter a room, kill all the enemies, move to next room. Rinse and repeat.
This is the crux of Dungeon Fighter Live. Both genres the game pulls from are repetitive by their very nature and forcing them together results in the worst of both worlds. You'll grab quests glorified list of menu options disguised as the main town before venturing off into the game's handful of dungeons. The game's idea of quests falls exclusively into the kill X number of monsters or collect Y number of drops school of design, offering little reward, sense of meaning or reason to keep playing.
There's a decent enough combat system hidden in here with special moves initiated via fighting-game-style motions and containing the ability to cancel and chain attacks. Yet the combat system never really passes beyond being serviceable, and the fact that most of the enemies simply stand around waiting for their turn as combo-fodder certainly doesn't help.
Playable characters are divided into three classes, falling into the traditional archetypes of the genre. You have your sword wielding Slayer, your duel wielding Gunner, and the speedy hand to hand Fighter. Hitting the level cap of 20 with one of the characters takes a little more than 15 hours, and each character comes with their own intricacies and special moves that do a decent job in splitting the characters into certain roles within a group.
You might notice however that this only adds up to three character classes for what is designed to be a four player game. Congratulations, you have now put more thought into this then the developers of Dungeon Fighter Live have. A four player match will guarantee at least one repeated character in your group and the game has no easy way to customize the appearance of your character. And when you consider the MMO version of the game has double the amount of classes it really makes one wonder why they couldn't have brought one more into the fold.
Weird and unfriendly decisions seem to permeate Dungeon Fighter Live, though. Almost every aspect of the game's presentation seems to be as needlessly obtuse as possible. Accessing items requires rummaging through an inventory with too few entries on each screen, forcing scrolling through pages and pages of items. Equipping new items is a process of trial and error, with the descriptions making it unclear what exactly is different about each weapon. The same holds true for the presentation of the game, as the sprite-based artwork animates in a stiff and off-putting way.
Multiplayer is a big part of the draw, and the game offers both local and online drop in/drop out co-operative play. If you are going to get any fun out of Dungeon Fighter Live, online play is a necessity, and works well enough, despite the same lack of intuitiveness present in the match making system as in the rest of the game.
There are also plenty of technical issues to contend with. In my time with Dungeon Fighter Live I've been frozen in rocks, stuck in rooms where enemies never spawned or died preventing progress and have had to do a hard reset of my Xbox at least three times.
Dungeon Fighter Live has very little going for it. If you already play the MMO the game is based off of and want a lesser version of that, this game comes close enough to adequate enough times to scratch that itch. But at no point did I ever feel engaged, much less excited, to be playing Dungeon Fighter Live, especially considering the whole host of superior beat 'em ups are available on the service. If you want to mix your beat 'em up with the joy of seeing numbers pop up, play something like Final Fight, Castle Crashers or Guardian Heroes and punch a calculator.
It'll be roughly the same experience and will probably hurt less.
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