This is Dungeon Runner

See dungeon runner run.
run dungeon runner, run.

Dungeon runner is an MMO that I've been playing lately. I purchased it about a week before it released the news that it was going out of business. That's unfortunate, but I think I'll survive. I mean, I paid five dollars for the game *and* six month's subscription. I wish I could see how they went out of business with a business plan like that. Oh, and did I mention their server only holds 500 people, total? That's like, five thousand dollars of profit a year, man! Except that more than half their players subscribe to the free version of the game. That means their items are about 10% worse than paid customers. Boy, what value for that money, huh?

Obvious business plan flaws aside, Dungeon Runners is a pretty fun game. It's light-hearted, erring on the side of ridiculous, and looks nice, plays inteutively and so on. Did I mention that the dungeons are (kinda) randomly generated, too? All the better.

Dungeons in dungeon runner follow a few simple rules. There are eight floors, divided into three sections. Upper, lower and boss. There are also six sub-areas off of varying floors, two off the upper and four off the lower. Each group (upper, upper-sub, lower and lower-sub) has a different theme. Undead, blizzard, fire, standard dungeon and so on. Each theme has several variations, and overall it's not too sore on the eyes. They're then mapped out by taking a number of puzzle-piece like pre-generated areas and randomly sticking them beside one another until it's about half an hour to cross from one end to the other. It works out well for them.

There are four different classifications of monsters I've come across so far. Whiskers (rat-men), Oroks (orcs and ogres), Fade (undead) and mutants. Each of those groups comes in about six units (discounting bosses) and each unit comes in one of the six major elements. Typically a particular floor in a dungeon will contain either one type of enemy, or one element of enemy. There's a few problems with this, namely that you will either see hundreds of the same enemy on a given floor, or you will have to have many different elemental attacks ready making your play rather like a game of simon-says involving far too many healing potions.

You play through the game, completing quests for the various silly NPCs around the main area, unlocking a new dungeon every ten levels or so. It's a fairly good system. If not for the silly quests though, the game would get old fast. Now that the game is ending, you get five times the experience you would have otherwise. That means you can blow through a half-dozen levels in an afternoon, rather than one. Not that it matters. All levels matter is what skills you have available to you, and which enemies give you experience points. I'm now thirty levels too high to gain experience points in the first dungeon, but I still encounter swarms of enemies that force me to use healing potions, and enemies I can't kill in one hit. What's the point of being so powerful if you don't actually get stronger?

Despite all my nitpicks of the game, it does have a je-ne-sai-quas that makes it fun. Or, fun most of the time at least.