March 12, 2008 - When you see a goblin, your first
thought typically isn't, "Oh, how can I help that slimy little
creature?" but instead it's, "How fast can I kill it?" While it
certainly is possible to lay waste to the goblins in Dungeon Hero,
as the name indicates your main task is saving them. We were given a
very early peek by developer FirstFly Studios at what to expect from
Dungeon Hero and came away with memories of Enclave dancing in our
heads.

As with several goblin based games before it, Dungeon Hero is about
hacking and slashing your way through enemy goblins, known as the Red
Eye faction. When you're not introducing your blade or your shield to
the face of your enemy you'll actually be perusing the goblin
lifestyle. That's actually where most of our demo took place. Our
hapless hero wandered around a goblin community that featured plenty of
ambient action to watch and listen to. Goblins tortured one another,
drank with their friends, shot darts and did pretty much what humans
did to one another back in medieval times.


Tons o' death.


The build that we saw was understandably early -- the game doesn't ship
until March 2009 -- but the combat already showed some promise. When a
group of six enemy goblins approached our unwilling hero he performed a
series of spins and lunges that did a good job of repelling one goblin
at a time while still keeping the main character in the center of the
action. There was a solid amount of chaos going on around us as the
friendly faction -- there are four in all with Gold Star (friendly) and
Red Eye being the only two shown to us -- bombarded an enemy stronghold
with cannon shots.

As with most hack and slash titles, Dungeon Hero has a certain level of
expandability built in so that the hero that begins the game won't be
the one that emerges when things are said and done. There are between
250 and 300 skills that you can built up by earning experience points,
and there's a massive skill tree that should provide different players
with separate combat styles by the end of the game.

So why exactly are you helping one of the fantasy world's most
disgusting creatures? Well, not many specifics are known at the moment,
but what we were able to squeeze out of FireFly was that your hero is a
bit of a nut job. In fact, they were willing to call him a full-blown
psychopath who has been tricked by the friendly goblins into helping
them repel Death (yes, grim reaper and all) which was awakened by the
rival sect of goblins as they were mining for treasure.

Dungeon Hero is showing promise for being at such an early stage in
development. With a March 2009 release FireFly should have plenty of
time to flesh out the goblin world that already possessed plenty of
personality during our demo. The combat seemed to feature a solid
feeling of weight and complexity while not being too tough to wrap your
head around. It seems as though the success of Dungeon Hero will be
contingent on the ability of the game to suck players into its world
and invest in its story. If that can happen then PC and Xbox 360 gamers
could have their next great hack and slash adventure on their hands.