Everlight

By Jason Van Horn

I love this game! It's like playing a MMORPG, Dungeons and Dragons, and Tecmo's old Deception series for the Playstation all wrapped up into one. It's a strange mixture in which you don't just spend time crawling through dungeons, but working on your own in hopes of killing all who may enter. It's unlike any MMO I've ever played before, and even with all the bells and whistles, it's all amazing packed together and works in your browser.

Once upon a time the gods of fire, water, light, and darkness ruled together in perfect harmony. Things turned sour and it wasn't long until the gods were warring with each other and attempting to overthrow one in order to obtain extra power. The quartet of quarreling gods eventually created The Dungeon Empires - a world in which they could once and for all test their abilities against each other. The gods ended up destroying themselves, but yet The Dungeon Empires remained. As someone who has discovered this mystical realm, you'll explore the many dungeons held within, while building your own with the hopes of ensnaring wannabe adventurers and taking what their corpses leave behind.



Players start by naming and picking their character, which amounts mostly to picking whether they're going to be a warrior type character or a magic wielding mage. You have a few options to choose in terms of changing the look of your character, but there aren't many, and since you won't be personally interacting with many of the players of the game, being able to look different from one another isn't a huge factor when it comes to Dungeon Empires. You'll then run through a tutorial that does a solid job at explaining both the dungeon crawling and dungeon creating aspects of the game.

The general gist is that the game is evenly split between the two actions of dungeon crawling and dungeon crafting. The world of Dungeon Empires is separated into several layers, each one more difficult than the last, so characters up to level 15 are expected to quest and crawl through the first level, players within a certain range are safe to start exploring the next, and so on. The game does have dungeons created by the developers, but the real meat of the game is choosing to adventure through dungeon masters just like yourself in order to take their dungeon down. As you explore the dungeon, you'll run across monsters, which will engage the game's turn-based RPG system. After a room has been cleared, you'll be able to loot a treasure chest, where you will always find gold for the picking, but you'll sometimes find keys, room fixtures, dungeon creatures, and new dungeon rooms as well. You can only pick one thing from each chest, however, and be wary that if you choose to reexamine the loot, you might find something you actually wanted, but most of the time you'll lose most everything and will have to settle on taking the reduced amount of gold. A dungeon is complete once you've found your way to the exit, but you'll really want to explore every inch until all the creatures are dead so that you can snag as much experience and loot as you can.



Once you've gained enough experience points your character will automatically level-up in a few categories - such as how much health they have - but you'll then have two attribute points you can use to put towards your character's strength, dexterity, and magic. Strength affects things like how hard you hit and how much health you have. Dexterity is focused on getting critical hits and how fast you can attack. Magic is focused on your spells and magical defenses. Each character only starts with a basic attack and a special attack which consumes mana, but eventually you'll be able to learn new skills upon reaching level ten, and you can further enhance your character by equipping them with the best armor you can buy or earn through drops in your own dungeon. The basic attack is pretty self-explanatory, but the special attack has three different settings. You can either use the basic version of the special attack, a quicker version of the attack, or a more powerful version of the attack. Using the normal version is as easy as clicking the icon, while the other two are triggered by clicking on the appropriate icon on either the top left or right of the attack and then holding the mouse down in order to charge the attack up; the longer you hold the button the more powerful the blow will be if it lands, but the longer you hold it the more mana it uses up. If you find you're running low on health or mana, you can always pop a potion either after or during a fight, as you can carry four items into a dungeon with you and even buy special emergency items while actually in the dungeon, though these cost real money.

Dungeon crawling is easy too thanks to several of the game's features. Players can move around the dungeons in a third-person perspective by using the traditional WASD keys, but you can also use the mouse to click objects in order to go straight to them, such as clicking on a door to head in that direction and then immediately open the door once you're in front of it. As you explore the dungeon a mini-map in the top right corner will start to reveal itself and show you everywhere you've been and what doors are still available to you that you haven't gone through yet. The mini-map is especially helpful when you find yourself moving farther and farther away from the exit as you're trying to find that last monster to kill. Instead of having to manually walk, however, players can click on any location within the map and if it's far enough away your character will break into a sprint and quickly make their way to your marker like the Flash as the rooms and corridors speed past them in a blur.



Before you actually choose a dungeon, the game does a great job at giving you enough information so that you can make an informed decision about whether you should try to attempt a dungeon or not, and yet not giving too much away so that the dungeon's creator still has a chance at bringing you down. The game will tell you the recommended level range, how many creatures are in the dungeon, and then the ranking of the dungeon and when the last person conquered the dungeon. The ranking is very important as it reflects the difficulty of a dungeon and how successful it is at doing its job - in other words killing people. If you manage to stop someone from completing it your rating will go up, but if someone manages to get through it your rating will go down. Ultimately the idea is to raid dungeons, grab the loot you can, and then use your rewards until you're the best dungeon maker in the realm. The only thing I hate about the dungeon crawling portion is that each player only has 300 action points and it takes 50 just to raid one dungeon; it wouldn't be a problem if your points replenished pretty rapidly, but they charge so slow you're often left wanting to play more of the game than you actually can. While we're on the subject of tackling dungeons, you can even team with other players and try to take down dungeons you might have tried before and couldn't complete for one reason or another.

Building dungeons is slightly complicated at first, but it's a lot easier to use than some other systems out there. Players are basically given a map and they're free to do with it as they wish, but they're limited based on items they've found and how much gold they have at their disposal. The only real rule is that each room must somehow make a connection to some other room on the map, so you can't have an empty room set to the side and no way to reach it. You'll find different room layouts from looting chests, as some are larger than others, some only allow for small monsters, some only have one door, others have multiple places for fixtures, etc. The challenge comes in properly utilizing everything you have so that your dungeon is as deadly as possible.
The main way to spice up your dungeon is by adding monsters, which include everything from giant insects to goblins, orcs, thieves, skeletons, and eventually even dragons. Each room has size restrictions, so if a room only allows the placement of small creatures you can't put something like a golem or dragon into that slot. Players can further enhance the monsters of a certain room by adding fixtures, which are tied into different groups of monsters, so some creeping ivy might help improve the effectiveness of any ant-based creatures placed in there while a shrunken head would improve how a mummy performs. Players can also change a room's style and add magical shards to give a room special effects such as an increase to fire damage sustained to the player. The creatures won't blindly follow you, however, as they expect compensation for the work they do for you. The dungeon as a whole is represented as a satisfaction level, which slowly declines over time. As you let this meter drop further and further, you'll find that your monsters will start hording your earned gold for themselves and not giving you all the profit they've earned by killing people. In order to raise this meter up and keep your monsters happy, you'll have to take the time to pay the monsters with gold from your own pocket so they can keep turning around a profit for you.



Each room generally comes with one door and one creature marker, but there are extra slots for you to place additional creatures, open up new fixture settings, etc. In order to unlock these features you must first level-up a room and then use those points to unlock the grayed out areas. Players can use real money to raise the level of a room, but players can also spend special runes in order to make the room level-up after six hours of rebuilding (so to speak). The game isn't too clear on this function, but players can earn these leveling runes by taking rooms they don't need, sending them to the shredder, and then getting a handful of runes back in return for the sacrifice (each room will tell you the minimum and the maximum amount of runes you can obtain and the outcome is a dice roll to see what the actual number is).

There is quite a bit of depth when it comes to dungeons, as you actively have to keep them in working condition by paying the monsters to work for you, plus you have to find the creatures, fixtures, and rooms in the first place, and then it takes so much gold to be able to put a creature into a slot you've got one way or another as well. It then comes down to properly utilizing your monsters and fixtures to form combos so that your dungeon isn't as easily overran and hopefully more people die at your hands. Building the perfect dungeon ultimately comes down to discovering new items, trying out different combos, and seeing what works by playing through the dungeons of other players.



Browser-based games are often nothing more than static images on a screen, but Dungeon Empires actually features 3D graphics, and while some of the enemy models might look a little goofy, I'm still impressed that the developers were able to make a browser game that you can not only control, but that actually moves in real-time. Also, Dungeon Empires is one of only a handful of browser games that I've played that actually feature sound and music. The opening of doors and the stomping of boots gets annoying after some time, but the music is a great mood setter, and I love some of the ambiance in the game such as the ghostly moans that sound like someone telling you to "stay." Overall I was really impressed when it came to the game's technical prowess; it's not amazing stuff and not the best out there, but it is pretty darn good for a browser-based game.

There's something endearing about Dungeon Empires that keeps me addicted and wanting more. Dungeon crawling and discovering new loot does become repetitious after a while, but the problem isn't that bad and alleviated somewhat due to the fact that I know I'm playing through someone else's real dungeon and screwing them over every time I manage to get through it alive (I especially love knowing that the game is sending them mail to let them know that I'm killing their monsters too). On the other side of the coin, it's fun being able to build something that actually takes some work at in order for it to be functional and really put up a challenge, and knowing that there's someone out there playing the game and cursing me because I killed them. Dungeon Empires is an intoxicating blend of a game and one unlike any other game I've played in the MMO genre.

Rating: 4 out of 5

http://dungeonempires.gamigo.com/