Dungeon Hunter: Alliance (PS3)

Alliance is a four player, co-op, RPG original, playable locally or online.

Release Date: Apr 12, 2011

 This is a big step forward from the original's single-player only campaign. Also like the original, players will be able to choose one of three different classes: Rogue, Warrior, and Mage. Rogue and Warrior are melee attackers and Mages cast magic from a distance. 

The game opens in the Royal Tomb dungeon where you're woken from a sarcophagus by a fairy who claims she's just saved you from death. Not wasting any time, you're thrown into dungeon-crawling action fighting against clusters of Goblin Crawlers. 

Playing with a DualShock 3 is simple and easy to get into. The X button is a regular attack, Square triggers a heavy attack, R1 is used to interact with environmental objects, and the L2 triggers a special Fairy Attack, which deals lightning damage to every enemy in a wide radius around the player. 

Royal Tomb was fairly straight-forward. Goblin Crawlers were easily beaten with 4-5 whacks of a sword or a few bursts of Mage magic. Sprinkled throughout the level are various story points where you can read up on the lore and, occasionally, pull switches to open gates. Mid-way through the level we encountered a Cremator, a lumbering stone giant whose body was in flames. He was effectively a mini-boss and it took about two minutes of orchestrated thwacking with my three other partners to take him down. 

If one of your partners dies during combat another player can bring him back to life by standing over him and hitting R1. So long as another party member is alive you can keep bringing back fallen party members. The loot drop system is also a fairly streamlined operation, with gold automatically divvied up between players. There are occasional treasure chests throughout each level with class-specific weapons that you can pick up. 

After dealing with the Cremator, we made our way through the last half of the dungeon fighting slightly more challenging clusters of Goblin Crawlers and Goblin Sorcerers, ranged magic users who'd hurl fireballs at us from a distance. Once out of the dungeon, we arrived in Thanos Village, one of the game's hub environments where we were able to buy new weapons and items with our gathered gold, assign skill points, and talk to villagers to learn more story tidbits and get directions for future assignments. 

Playing with the Move controller changes the experience significantly, but so far it doesn't seem to be much of an enhancement over a traditional controller. The Move controller works like a mouse: you'll move around an icon on screen and then hold down the trigger button to make your character move in that direction. The face buttons still control basic attacks but the Fairy Attack gets motion treatment, requiring a shaking back and forth to pull off the area attack. Playing with the Move is, in theory, closer to the old school controls, but the Move sensitivity was so high it felt like small gestures would send it careening all over the screen. The game is already pretty tough to follow with four small characters clumping on top of one another in the dungeon murk, so adding a layer of indirectness to the controls doesn't much help the experience. 

Alliance was also slightly underwhelming visually. Environments are detailed and look much sharper than the iPhone version, but the art style doesn't make the transition from iPhone to console as well. The original was a neat technical feat in spite of its forgettable designs. Alliance is much less of a technical feat on PS3 and the lack of personality in the art really dampens the experience. 

Alliance ran smoothly in my play session and it certainly occupies an area of game design that not many console designers are competing in at the moment. It definitely doesn't have the wit and style of DeathSpank, but it does offer a much more traditional, if predictable, experience.