View All (4)

Dungeon Runners steals every single one of its gameplay mechanics from either the Diablo series or World of Warcraft.  Player characters spawn in Dew Valley, a tiny town that links to the first of the game’s many instances.  Non-player characters in the town have little exclamation marks above their heads to indicate a quest offer, and talking to them yields a quest dialogue box that looks exactly like the quest briefings in WoW.  The skill/spell bar is exactly like the one found in Blizzard’s successful MMO.  On the other side of things, the character attribute and inventory management systems are carbon copies of the interface in Diablo II.  

The combat is just like a 3D version of the click-heavy Diablo games, but with some jittery targeting.  Players will try to concentrate damage on the most dangerous monster in a group, only to find themselves accidentally clicking on its inconsequential minions or the ground next to them, resulting in a misplaced attack or move command while some horrid beast devastates the player character’s health.  Encounters otherwise unfold like accelerated versions of WoW fights, beginning with “pulling” an enemy from a group, then taking monsters out one by one, or diverting monster aggression when playing in a group of adventurers.

Grouping with other players is one of the bigger draws of the game.  There’s an option to have Dungeon Runners search for a suitable party for a player, which usually composes a group of similarly-leveled characters in a dungeon everyone can handle, though it can be a pain to catch up with a party that has already cleared multiple levels of an instance.