Dungeon Hero

By Sam Prescott

Dungeon Hero’s still a while away, but FireFly have released a few early builds to media overseas and initial reports have it that the game looks pretty spiffy. Unlike many dungeon crawler/hack n slash efforts before it, in Dungeon Hero you (the hero) are expected to save a population of goblins rather than lay waste to them.

Eh? Yeah, I know what you mean. Goblins are for hacking and slashing – Elves are for saving, possibly pixies too. Goblins are vile. Well, FireFly at least haven’t lost their grip on ‘reality’ completely. The goblins you fight to save from Death (as in the hooded dude whose best representation in a media text is still the Death of Terry Pratchett fame) are by no means sweethearts. You’ll discover this walking around their festering towns, where they happily indulge in hoarding, torture and other goblinish pursuits. An evil goblin faction has released Death while they were mining and he’s not real happy about being disturbed. He’s a busy entity, you know. So it’s your job to calm him and his minions down. With a big sword.

Up to 300 skills can be learned by your character as you progress through the various levels, which should provide a great deal of scope for battle abilities and all the magical goodness that comes along with these titles. Early screen shots show impressive graphical power and interesting collections of beasties but, being that the title isn’t due til 2009, the developers are keeping a lot of this stuff on the down low.

With a bit of time spent creating a decent story, Dungeon Hero has the potential to be a superb title, albeit rich in fantasy cliché. What always excites me about upcoming games of this ilk is seeing what the developers do with the fantasy realm – some disappoint and simply scratch the surface, providing a basic world with about as much depth as a TV3 weather-girl, but some bring us layer upon layer and simply exploring becomes a game in itself. Here’s hoping FireFly anchor themselves in the latter category. They still have a long time to get it right.

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