Dungeon Punks is a couch co-op 3 player tag team RPG brawler (phew) reminiscent of classic side view NES beat ’em ups, boasting a variety of characters and bunch of items and abilities – Dungeon punks leaves you entertained for a good amount of hours, but make sure you have a friend because playing it solo is (to put it bluntly) boring.
10 years ago when my household first got ADSL and around a single gigabyte of data a month, I used to play a game called Adventure Quest, a turn-based RPG with an (at that time) immersive graphical experience for a flash game. As soon as I loaded up Dungeon Punks I was instantly brought back to that time and the memories flooded back of those countless hours spent building my character.
Perhaps I was expecting a revamped version of Adventure Quest; a large map, fluid animations, countless spells and items, and I guess too an extent I wasn’t wrong, I just felt disappointed. There was no large map, the animations are still the same static style of the game I played 10 years ago, the storyline, music, titles and items are generic it’s almost as if the developers took the flash game and repurposed it for this 2016 release.
Those problems are something anyone else who doesn’t have a history with Adventure Quest could fairly easily get over – something that newcomers wouldn’t is the clunky and sometimes unresponsive d-pad controls which makes the game feel like a PlayStation 1 title. Dungeon Punks would’ve run far better if the analog sticks were implemented just like any other ‘next gen’ title release out there.
With those problems out of the way the heroes abilities, spells are really fun and even with the clunky controls the RPG take on a brawler is actually a pretty fun time. You have to really work together as a team to make sure you manage your health potion consumption, dodge attacks, take out specific enemies first and use the right abilities in conjunction when taking on bosses.
If you don’t have any friends and are tasked with the solo experience (Which I 100 percent recommend you don’t), fear not for the AI does a pretty good job at keeping alive, assisting you, and grabbing pickups, which is fantastic because you get to carry on with your own knowing that your teammate isn’t doing something stupid like using up your items at pointless parts or attacking you when you try cast out a spell. Nothing is worse than a game that requires you to hamper after an AI teammate whose personal goal is to make your video game experience hell.
When it comes to the story Dungeon Punks feels like it could be far more gripping, one doesn’t really feel like the objectives are worth following, the player basically looks forward to getting to the next boss get loot and then move directly to the next level to continue, which like I said, is fun with two other friends but can get monotonous really quickly when playing solo.
If you have a couple hours to waste and 2 friends keen for a little bit of fun then this game is a good choice the amount of items, loot and spells will keep you entertained for a while but I don’t see anyone going through and finishing the game in one sitting.
Disclosure: Review code for the game was provided by the publisher.
