lanm

Dungeon Hunter 2 was my absolute favorite game on my phone, being very much like the mobile version of Diablo. Dungeon Hunter 3 is absolutely terrible. Many games have adopted the practice of in app purchases, but DH3 has fundamentally changed the game to revolve around them. You are put in an arena, you kill some monsters, go to another arena, kill some monsters, and so forth forever. There are no item drops at all, only money. You have to buy all your gear. You can also upgrade, which prevents you from using the item while the item upgrade takes several hours in real time. Maybe because they want you to buy two sets of gear or something like that. There is no plot and no dungeons and no quests. When you finish an arena you see this little animation with a cauldron of gold coins showering coins around the screen. It looks EXACTLY like one of the banner adverts for online casinos you frequently see on the internet. Flashing lights. Shiny things. Keep gambling! That is the psychology behind this game. It is boring beyond words.

The biggest problem with Diablo 3 is that it shows that Blizzard now treat their paying customers with contempt, nothing but cattle to milk dry, and it's an attitude built into the games. The Real Money Auction House and Always On DRM mean that now Blizzard can push an update at any moment and you get it whether you want it or not. So if Blizzard want to improve their end of financial year statement, they can push a patch to increase difficulty to encourage in game purchases. Blizzard must have thought the many years they had statisticians monitoring and balancing the economy of Diablo 2 was knowledge they could "monetize". Diablo 3 is setup around the premise of an economy that Blizzard control completely and can fiddle the numbers to maximise profit. So it's no surprise then that the game ****. The idea of "builds" that made Diablo 2 so much fun has effectively been removed by the "casualisation" of the game at the earlier difficulty levels to increase the customer base. It's now impossible to ruin your character. The game is now about finding (or paying real) money instead of finding items. The plot is also horrible. Avoid at all cost.

The first games graphics were amazing, but the sequel actually makes them look bad. Not only does the game look great, it's full of imaginative encounters that will leave you smiling. My only issues with the game is the "endurance" areas where enemies attack in waves and you have to be very defensive to make it through, and also some of the physics puzzle. You can work out the solution to a problem, but the physics to accomplish the solution are so fiddly it can bring the entire game to a screeching halt for an extended duration.

Good! The humour is even better then last time. The difficulty if you're playing on single player is ridiculous though. Deaths can often result from simply running out of ammo during boss battles (even though for most of the game there is more ammo then you can carry). Can't help but think that this is another game company saying "you don't want to play single player - get online". Also suspect is the fact that the first DLC is a new character that is probably the best for single player. Gearbox, please set aside the DLC until you've balanced the game correctly!

I'm very disappointed by the use of a strange type of Alway On DRM in this game. When not connected to the internet you can play the game, but you can't make any progress. You can't ever get to the next level. To unlock new levels you have to play in "Normal Mode" (online) as opposed to "Local Mode", as the makers call it. There are also severe bugs that mean you can't play the game directly from Steam on Mac, but have to locate the application folder and run it directly. Apart from that, the game is OK. The game is novel with the way the level gets built around you as containers crash into your ship, every container having it's own gravity, and being able to make short leaps through open space. But after you've seen all that in the first five minutes, the game becomes very, very repetitive.