I love Dungeon Defenders. The original is something I enjoyed for hundreds of hours during its peak, and every couple of years, I still come back to enjoy a run or two.

You can imagine my excitement when I saw this game on kickstarter. I backed the $60 dollar version which was supposed to come with extra goodies.

It finally releases to early access, and I am happy. The game plays well, and while it is still lacking, it is clear they have a good idea of what they want to do, and how they want to do it. Some of the maps are remakes from the original game, while some of the maps are new. This is great, and makes this feel like a lot more than "just a remake".

But at some point during development, something shifted. Maybe sales slowed down, maybe they lost their spark, or maybe they simply did not give a fuck anymore. They stopped trying, and they patched the game into a worse version of itself.

In order to release the game on Switch, they made it so enemy spawns would be reduced. Effects were tuned down, and loot drops were nerfed. According to the devs, this was done on the PC version because it would be "impossible to manage two versions of the game".

They also thought that early supporters and players were "too powerful", so they wanted old players to restart. So if you grinded for 100+ hours to get your perfect loot in the early days of the game, this loot would be invalidated. You have to do it again. This was done to make it a more balanced experience for new players. What?
New players would also be able to grind for this loot. Even then, they introduced a higher difficulty mode (which drops even better loot), so there was no point in nerfing the old loot to begin with. Players would just grind this new even harder difficulty to get even better loot.
People got upset about this nerf, so they split the game into two servers. One server where the old loot would persist, and one where it got invalidated. This makes no sense.

They would add things from the original Dungeon Defenders to the game, such as the spiders spawning behind towers, without also implementing the counters to these enemy typed. This means that half the cast's towers immediately become unusable. This means that if you liked to play as one of these characters, you now can't play the game anymore. This persisted for months before they added the same counter from the original game (the summoner class).

It did not take long before people started hacking the game, spawning in loot with endless stats. The devs then decided to implement checks, however this was done in the worst way I have ever seen. They defined a "max stats" for your gear. If you have gear in your inventory that exceed these stats, you get banned. Their "max stats" was worse than the items that were dropping in the game normally, meaning if you played legitimate and picked up loot from high tier stages, you would get banned.
Not only that, but hackers would just spawn loot in other people's lobbies, and if you picked them up, bye bye.

People were understandably getting upset, so what do the devs do? They start working on another, new Dungeon Defenders game. This game barely functions, and they release a Dungeon Defenders Roguelike? This is where people knew for sure they had been scammed. Sidenote, that roguelite they released in early access never got any updates in a year.

It is safe to say that Chromatic Games, previously known as Trendy Entertainment has no idea what they are doing. They have repeatedly scammed their fans, and are quick to abandon their projects the second they feel like it, with no news, not even a shitty corporate "im sorry".

And by the way, it has been over 3 years since the game released and I was supposed to get my Kickstarter rewards, but I never got them. Thank you.

It tries, but doesn't quite succeed in capturing the charme of the original game. It's hard to describe, but things just don't seem to have any weight anymore. It definitely could've been more, and could've done without the sanitized (and at times buggy) UI.

Supposedly difficulty is going to (or has already been) revamped, but that won't change that for me, Nightmare felt no different from Insane, when it used to be the highest difficulty and a huge step up. Massacre measures up somewhat, but there really shouldn't have been a need for a sixth difficulty.

That said, it does add many nice QoL features, balances hero skills better and avoids many of the mistakes that led to the original game's downfall after it's Eternia Shards DLC (namely the introduction of the overpowered Goblin Copter, paid DLC characters that were mandatory for further progression, and all map builds becoming exactly the same once you pass a certain point).
Mistakes that the Community Dev Team for DD1 sadly doubled down on, making exploits such as tower-stacking and the use of virtual controllers for higher reward payouts or buffs mandatory as well. Which is why I would not go as far as to say that DD1 is clearly superior.

I'd say, play DD1 first, but stop after you finish the Quest for the Lost Eternia Shards DLC. The content that came afterwards, both from the OG devs and the community devs, sharply drops in quality due to balancing issues. Then, maybe pick this one up on a sale.