Dungeon Hunter 2: iPhone Review

The original Dungeon Hunter for the iPhone and iPad came out late last year and Gameloft has been quick on the uptake for a sequel. Great news is that almost all parts of the game have been improved on. Dungeon Hunter 2 is your basic hack and slash role-playing game, which is pretty much identical in gameplay terms to the original. You play as one of the Kings sons and it is up to you to get rid of your evil brother, Prince Edward, and end his rein over Gothicus.  

EXCLUSIVE CO-OP MULTIPLAYER MODE: Play the campaign solo or with up to 4 adventurers at the same time.

** IMPORTANT: MULTIPLAYER COMPATIBILITY ** Multiplayer mode available only on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 3G or iPod Touch 4G, with 3.1.2 OS or higher.

Team up online via Wi-Fi or locally via Bluetooth or local wireless.

Game Center and Gameloft Live compatible: Find teammates, rise up the leaderboards , unlock achievements and more.

Fight tougher enemies, face even more challenging quests and combine the talents of your team members to become even deadlier.

25 YEARS LATER, RETURN TO GOTHICUS - IN HD

You are one of the immortal king's sons. Survive a war, escape from prison, and travel across your realm to save everything!

Enter Gothicus' dark fantasy atmosphere with high-definition graphics, optimized for iPhone 4.

DUNGEON HUNTER LEVELS UP!

Enjoy the same addictive hack 'n slash gameplay with new finely tuned controls and save system.

An open world 5 times bigger than before with more enemies, more areas, more quests and more hours of enjoyment.

3 difficulty levels, all of which can be unlocked by finishing the game once.

DEEP CUSTOMIZATION SYSTEM

Choose among 3 character classes with 2 specializations each and improve your character with dozens of different skills.

Hundreds of unique items to collect, including melee and ranged weapons, that will impact your character's look and skills.

The game now gives you the choice of three different classes. You can pick from Warrior, Mage or Rogue and each one can be upgraded to a specialty within that class. You control your character by way of a virtual stick in the bottom left of the screen and with various touch based options on the right of the screen.

You get experience points based on the enemies you kill and the quests that you complete. The experience you earn goes towards leveling up your character so that you can improve strength, dexterity and other regular RPG based skills.

As with most role-playing games you gain loot during your quests, which comes in the form of equipment and money. You have 10 slots where you can make use of your equipment such as rings, weapons and armor. The better your skills and level, the better the armor and weapons that you can use.

So what has changed since the original game? Well, one of the best things for us is the improvement in loading times. It feels so much faster to load areas than the first game did, knocking down load times from around 25 seconds to just 5-10 seconds in Dungeon Hunter 2. Excellent work from Gameloft.

The addition of the varying classes and the six specialties means that replayability has been improved no end. The size of the levels has also been increased, with the linear small levels of the original being replaced with much larger and wider maps to navigate through.

The major new feature in the game is multiplayer and this is a big deal for many Dungeon Hunter fans. In multiplayer you can host games or join the lobby to get a group together to play through the game in co-op mode. Dungeon Hunter 2 allows you to team up with four players. The games that we have played through multiplayer over wi-fi have worked well, although we have run into a few issues where we haven't been able to find other players to work with. Although this seems to be more of a Game Center issue as we haven't seen the problem through Gameloft Live.

Graphically the game is one of the best-looking iPhone titles around at the moment. No, it can't quite compete with the likes of Infinity Blade, but what it does have is loads of colour, great textures and a good frame rate. The colour is what really impressed us most, thanks largely to the iPhone 4 screens, though the levels are also full of great artwork and art design.

However, the sound is not as good. While the majority of the game sounds great, there are occasions when some small sound effects seem to be missing. This hasn't happened too often though and we fully expect it to be fixed in a patch soon. Music is generally good; we just hope that someday we get voice work added to games like this, even if it does bump up the file size quite a bit.

There are a couple of other issues that we have also noticed. Our achievements have not synced with Game Center no matter what we do to try to rectify it. There are also times when you still get stuck in scenery just as you could do in the original game, but these are small issues that can be fixed and certainly shouldn't deter you from getting the game.

Gameloft have done a great job with Dungeon Hunter 2, not only does it look far better than the original, the gameplay and the story has been improved. The addition of co-op multiplayer for a game like this is also a godsend, both for longevity and fun. The small niggles that we had with the game will be rectified when a new version is released onto the iTunes App Store. So if you were a fan of the original, or a fan of hack and slash games in general, you should love Dungeon Hunter 2. 