Since we’ve gotten such an overwhelming response from the Dungeon Fighter Online community (it damn near knocked the socks off of all of us here at GamersRoute) I’ve decided to run a full fledged preview of the game for you guys who haven’t yet gotten a chance to play.  You may have read my brief thoughts here about the game, but in this article I’m going to delve a bit more in-depth.

Dungeon Fighter Online, as I hope you all know by now, is the next big thing from Nexon, a company renown for it’s free-to-play games.  Like all of Nexon’s other games, Dungeon Fighter Online will…drumroll please…be free to play!

The Slayer

The game allows you to control one of the greatest fighters ever to see the light of day, especially because YOU are the one behind the controls, and of course, you ARE one of the greatest fighters ever to see the light of day, aren’t you?  When you jump in to the free-to-play game, (hopefully on September 15th during the Early Access Beta) you will take on the identity of one of these five character classes:

• SLAYER: A sword wielding maniac, possessed by a dark demon.  One of his hands is crippled by the demon, but he is able to use it’s dark powers to destroy enemies while in dungeons.

• FIGHTER: A beautifully deadly close-combat specialist, the fighter uses her hands to destroy everything around her.  You’ll likely see her wielding brass knuckles or claws.

• GUNNER: Tall and skinny, the gunner prefers to hang back from combat and blast his enemies from afar with some sort of giant death dealing device.

• MAGE: A petite young girl, the mage wields magical energy to blast away her opponents.  She also has utility spells which allow her to confuse her enemies.

• PRIEST: A powerful holy warrior, devoted to the eradication of demons.  He wields holy powers to heal himself and destroy his enemies.

The Fighter

Each of these five classes has it’s own sub-class specialization.  When the player reaches level 18, they are allowed to pick a sub-class spec for their character, which adds further variety to the game.  This makes it so that even if  you have a party full of Gunners, each Gunner could be specialized differently allowing the players ways to differentiate themselves from within the pack.  I like this idea of sub-specialization, as it adds further replayability to the game.  I will probably become an alt-a-holic, creating a ton of different classes up to level 18 just to see how the different specializations change gameplay.

Now that we’ve gotten all that character stuff out of the way, let’s move on to a more in-depth discussion of my experience at PAX.  I got to play as a Slayer, a Mage, and as a Gunner, and I have to say my favorite class was the Slayer.  The way the character could move across the screen, clearing it of enemies was fun.  I felt super powerful and the beat-em-up gameplay was addictive.  The Slayer had this ability which allowed me to rush at my enemies, slashing while moving forward rapidly and doing immense amounts of damage.  It could be comboed together three times, but after that had to take some time to recharge.

The Gunner

ClassicMoments and I had the chance to play in a PvP match as well.  I was playing as a Gunner, while he was playing as a Slayer.  Unfortunately for me, he really kicked my ass…but I’d like to blame it on the fact that this was my first time playing a Gunner and I was just figuring out the fact that I could dash  by double tapping on the arrow keys to run away from him.  The Gunner’s skills were also very cool, allowing me to do massive damage in a short amount of time (if I knew what I was doing, and wasn’t getting my head bashed in by CM’s giant sword).

The Mage

Before PAX was over, we went back to the Nexon booth to play again.  This time I got to try out a Mage who had been sub-class specialized as a Summoner.  This was cool as well, but the combat wasn’t as in-your-face as the other classes.  I called upon the spirit of some beast, or imp, or some sort of creature (I’m not sure what it was, I was too busy bashing in faces) to help me in my quest, then led the Mage to victory and defeated a dungeon boss.  I was stopping to examine my “phat lewt dropz” when I realized I didn’t have any idea what was a good drop and what was a bad one…I guess I’ll have to wait for the game to come out for me to know.

The controls on all three were actually surprisingly easy to get used to.  I was skeptical at first, as this style of gameplay I would never think could be enjoyable on the keyboard, but after about 10 minutes I had forgotten all about it and was too busy slaying the countless number of evil dungeon dwelling fiends to notice or care.  As we said earlier, we did talk to Nexon about controller support, which they were actually working on right before PAX but unfortunately weren’t quite ready to show off to the public.  I can see myself in a few months, wireless controller in hand, computer monitor shoved to the front of my desk so I can slay bad-guys from the comfort of my own bed.

The Priest

Another thing that irked me as well as CM at first was the lack of HD sprites, but we quickly got over it.  The game looks 10-times better than any other old-skool beat-em-up you played in your childhood, and the sprites rendered well on the LCD monitors they were displaying it on.  I’m really excited about this whole “return-to-2d” movement, and I’ve seen quite a few game companies doing it well.  I’ve always been a sucker for beautifully rendered sprites, with fighting games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Street Fighter III being at the top of the list.  I’m excited to see more from DFO and hopefully add it as one of my favorite sprite based games.

Check out a DFO PvP video here, and feel free to ask questions and leave comments!