ryan vincent jaeger

Dungeon Runners is an action based online role-playing game that’s free to download and free to play.

At first glance when I entered Dungeon Runners I was immediately reminded of Dungeon Siege, with an art style similar to that of World of Warcraft. The a game world looks like it was created with tile sets, similar to that of Neverwinter Nights.

The game structure concept is simple. You start in an area filled with other players and the area contains all the quests and supplies you’ll need for the instanced zone(s). In a sense its just like Diablo2 with 3D meeting rooms (ala Guild Wars). Movement is WASD or Point and click, and combat is fast paced Point-and-Click ala Dungeon Siege. The mobs are party mobs, similar to that of Lineage2. If you’re not familiar with party mobs, party mobs are groups of creatures that travel together and usually have lower HP than a solo mob.

The sound is nothing to be excited about, as there are a lot of unaltered library sounds, and voice acting similar to that of a power rangers episode (humorous at times). The music seemed well done and fit nicely however. The environmental preset I heard in the first areas sounds clean, although there is no way to turn it off from the game menu or config files as far as I can see. I will say that as a whole the sound works for the game, just it seems like an afterthought… Hey its free after all.

Game performance is quite decent even at high resolutions and high settings, I seemed to be getting around 24-30fps @ 1680×1050 (AMD AthalonXP 3000+, 1gig DDR 400, ATI x800xt, WinXP Pro SP2). Network latency seems to be a large issue currently during the time of this review, in all 3 of the test worlds. I’m sure they will correct this by the time the game is ready for launch.

Overall if you like Guild Wars or Dungeon Siege and don’t mind cartoon like graphics, give Dungeon Runners a try.

I thought I would start writing about what’s going on in my world. Currently I’m working on shuutobi material that will eventually make it as the first release on my own label. The material currently on my myspace are initial mixes and will probably get some more lovin’ before I decide which tracks make it as a collective whole…� It’s going to be an EP released around late q1 2007 and It will also most likely be released under an “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.”

I will keep y’all informed when anything important comes up.

Take it cheesy.
/rvj