Dungeon Defenders was one of the first games I purchased on Steam, and wow, what a banger it once was.

The game with almost infinite grinding potential, endless of hours well spent. A tower defense where you're forced to team up with people to succeed if you want to get the best gear. A really smart way to encourage you playing with strangers. Even if these strangers are weaker than you, they still help out by being able to upgrade your gear for you.

Trendy, or Chromatic Games as they're called now really struct lightning in a bottle. We played this game for years, and since it was such a cheap game, it was incredibly easy to make friends join you. Despite the unbalanced mess it was behind the scenes, it was a good time.
If you weren't grinding away for loot, you were probably going through the player shops, hoping to find some good armor or weapons for you to use.

As with most games, this game eventually stopped getting dev support, and the community slowly dwindled away. Though it has seen somewhat of a resurgence in the past few years, we all hope that something similar can be created in the future, with current technology.

Unfortunately Chromatic has turned out to be the scum of the earth. They create multiple DD clones, sell the game based on hype, overpromise and underdeliver every time. Some games like Dungeon Defenders Going Rogue I'd argue is a straight up scam. Others, like Dungeon Defenders Awakened had promise, but they always end up ruining the experience with a patch (such as deleting all your items, or removing things from the game so it'll run better on switch).

If you want to play a DD game, stick with the original.

This is really a game that just constantly has you improving every few minutes so the urge to keep playing becomes dangerously high. There's no down times or pace-breaking story, it's just pure arcadey fun but with a huge progression chain, so unlike large amounts of arcade games you still feel like you're aiming for something beyond a high score.

It's actually quite impressive how much content there is (of course I am playing a few years into the games life). It looks very empty at first, only 4 characters? Then you unlock a new one and it brings up many more. Then you unlock a secret character and it shows all the other secret characters. You're constantly unlocking new weapons and stages, the former of which is always fun to try and experiment with and see what evolves with what. While most of the stages are fairly plain, there's some fun gimmicky ones, like the newly added minecart stage, a stage based on Green Hill Zone with blocks similar to the special stages in that game which break after a certain amount of hits etc.

There's a lot of player-selected difficulty and challenges to be made by turnign on and off certain settings - no matter how much you upgrade, there's always an option to turn it all off to play as if starting a brand new game. But at the same time you can break the game in half by working out how to effectively farm golden eggs to create a character so powerful nothing can even touch you.

I found out this was supposedly made by someone using gambling psychology, except of course without the whole debt part. I'd love to see more vices be made into things that don't have their downsides, how about video games without the extreme time loss? 🤭

I guess as far as issues go, there's not many bosses that really do anything. Most of them just float around like any other enemy and try to overlap with your sprite to take you out. Towards the endgame there's definitely a sense that progression has slowed down - you're just playing to play now. While there's still stuff to unlock, you've already discovered the perfect item combos and can make a build to get you through pretty much anything, so a new item is at best worth a try or two, but lacks that excitement you get early on.

Very fun and massive amount of content for its price. Also a pretty good soundtrack.

I have no interest in hunting and I do not find it fun. I'm not sure why I even own this game (I might have found it for like 1$ at value village?). This game is of a worse quality than Wii era shovelware but requires a 7.3GB data download in order to be playable. The gameplay consists of running through the most generic pre-made unreal engine terrain you have ever seen to shoot animals, and it controls like garbage. My first 30 seconds into the game I got softlocked because I got stuck in a crack between two rocks and the slope was too deep for my character to walk out of. I'd also like to give a special shout out to this games incredibly diverse character roster (why does it have a character roster??) that consists of 4 white men and 2 white women, all of whom definitely do not look like they'd have an unhealthy obsession with a certain yellow haired, orange faced, formerly presidential individual.