I have played a lot of Tower Defense games over the years (most notably, the Orcs Must Die series) and I've always wondered whether Dungeon Defenders could fill a similar role. I was lucky to get a Steam key for the game and all DLC, so I could finally give it a test.
Having watched some gameplay prior to starting, I suspected that this was more of an hack-and-slash RPG with defense elements than a 'real' TD game, but I wanted to give it a chance. I put 23 hours into completing the campaign, leveling up Squire to LVL 70, also gave Apprentice and Summoner a go. Unfortunately, I encountered many problems.
Before getting to the main menu in the game, I get spammed with 50 popup messages about receiving all the DLC and other packs that have been made since the game launched. After that, I get an ad for some Kickstarter campaign. When you jump into online play, you get all of those popups and the ad AGAIN.
Keyboard controls in the options menu are not customizable, and don't even list all the things you can do, such as M to drop mana, etc. You HAVE to review and change them from the launcher, which requires exiting the game. Some other settings can only be changed via the launcher too. Updates to the game (which, even in 2026, seem to happen frequently) make the game forget your resolution and fullscreen settings every time, so you have to change those again.
Upon entering the tavern for the first time, I unlock the achievement for completing the tutorial, despite there not being one. I couldn't find one anywhere, and this game REALLY needs one. There are so many things the game doesn't explain at all and doesn't let you look up within the game. If I hadn't already watched some of Retro Pat's YouTube videos then I would be struggling way too much during my first few hours.
The Create A Character screens give you a little summary about each hero, but doesn't actually give you the crucial details about their abilities or defenses. That seems like a major omission.
I auto-lose on my 3rd mission because it turns out Hardcore Mode on by default! It also turned itself on again after an update!
So now, onto the core building/combat gameplay...
I wanted to try trap stranding and other core TD-related things, but since everything you build can be attacked and destroyed, it discourages spreading things out since you will then have to walk everywhere to repair or defend, and when you're at level 1-10, you move extremely slowly.
There are no range indicators for towers when placing them, either in-world or on the map. You get to see area of effect for some defenses, and rotation angles for towers, but you have no way of seeing their max distance, or how far up/down they can aim.
Most locations on most maps are simply not buildable, even places that look sensible. Almost anywhere that's not a floor, traversable by enemies, is a no-go. That means less room for creative strategic thinking.
From the RPG perspective, there are severe pacing issues.
[list][*]Everything is too slow at the start (hero speed, enemy wave timers for the first few levels, etc.)
[*]It takes ages to unlock all your hero's defenses (you start out only being able to build your first slot, and I think you have to get to LVL 15 to unlock the 5th).
[*]Starting every mission running around at a snail's pace opening chests, just to get enough mana to start building, is tedious. You're forced to do it again after every wave; this takes up 30-50% of your playtime every mission. I wish it would just auto-collect everything so I can get on with the important part!
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Tower upgrades don't feel very impactful. If you have mana to spare, choosing between an upgrade and placing more defenses is a no-brainer because a typical defense is 60-100 mana vs. 100 mana to boost a defense's stats by ~20%. You just spam more of them until you reach the limit, and only then do you upgrade, because that's all you can do. Upgrades should improve stats significantly (for example, in Sanctum 2, a tower's stats are typically doubled per upgrade, up to 3 times, compared to DD with 5 levels, each one only raising it by 20% up to a max of +100%).
If you fail a mission as a new player, it's extremely difficult to know whether your defense strategy was wrong or whether you're simply under-leveled. This problem is probably unavoidable once you addRunescape-like RPG leveling to a game. The difficulty in the main campaign is reasonably consistent but the bonus missions immediately afterwards are a completely different story. After completing The Summit on hard, I thought I could do Take City in the Cliffs on Medium. However, I'm immediately confronted with ogres, along with Djinn, Sharken and Spiders (none of which I had encountered before - the wiki says these are only supposed to appear on Nightmare). I guess the developers didn't balance it for solo play, but they could easily have done so by staggering the spawns just a little.
Ultimately, when taking all these things into consideration, DD doesn't feel like a TD game at all. I didn't expect it to play exactly like one, but I also feel like there's way too much emphasis on combat and co-op. In fact, the devs seem to EXPECT you to have multiple players OR to use the built-in splitscreen solo mode (F2 to F8, also not explained anywhere) to summon several of your heroes at once.
So, perhaps the "Pure Strategy" mode might change things up a little? There's no description for this little checkbox either, but I guessed it would involve removing hero combat from the equation, so you focus on defenses. In practice, the answer is... No? Apparently that's how it USED to be, until an update changed it so it's basically identical to Survival mode. So, it's completely pointless. What were they thinking?
Onto the game's UI. Damn is the UI in this game hard to read and use.
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[*]Everything looks like a gray button. Everything is laid out haphazardly and text spills out of boxes and buttons everywhere.
[*]There are no tooltips for most icons or text labels anywhere.
[*]Item management is awful. There's no function to auto-sell inferior items.
[*]You can't multi-select items.
[*]There's no text search or filter for items.
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I'll just summarize a few more minor annoyances:
[list]
[*]There are no alert sounds for when the crystal is under attack or when a defense is destroyed! You get a line of text in the same place as all the other messages about defenses being summoned, etc., so these events are easy to miss when you're busy in combat.
[*]There is no borderless fullscreen mode.
[*]Attention to detail in the map design: floating chains and gaps between floors and stairs in Deeper Well, floating chains in Alchemical Laboratory, City in the Cliffs has a bug where enemies get stuck in one spawn room. Many maps are not suitable for the Summoner since ceiling props block the tactical camera.
[*]Minimap is off by default. You have to go into the graphics settings to find it.
[*]The game only gives you info about wyvern spawns half the time. Many maps have wyvern spawns that are not shown anywhere on the map or in the world. You have to spot them early, or lose to them in order to find out where they actually come from. Why give perfect information about wave compositions at the doors when the biggest threat is hidden from you entirely, requiring memorization?
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If the game was in Early Access then I could forgive a lot of this, but since it's been out for 15 years and is still receiving patches, all I can do is shake my head in dismay. I really wanted to give this game the opportunity to surprise or wow me with its radically different approach to TD. Sadly, it just doesn't deliver. I know many people love it, but it's not for me. Perhaps some of these issues have been, or will be fixed in the new Awakened version of the game.
If you're after some good action-tower-defense games, check out Orcs Must Die 1-3, Sanctum 2, and X-Morph: Defense.
