Recent reviews by Mythic

Aside for spending 2 hours bouncing around with broken bike physics, the game didn't really offer anything too interesting. Falls short of the premise it lays out due to the gameplay not being interesting.

Runescape with less running and more scaping

Co-op worked without major issues, decent campaign to play through

Good addition to the base game

Not great, not terrible. Better than what most of the early access games give you in the genre, and has an ending already. Took around 10 hours to finish.

There are a few design choices that don't seem to make a whole lot of sense that I overlooked due to this being out as early access:
- Stamina isn't used for anything (except sprinting), and there's an absurd amount of it. There are no upgrades that give you more stamina. It does run out eventually, but overall it feels like it was added without much thought put into why it exists, and sprint could easily just be replaced with an infinite sprint without breaking game balance in any way.
- At times it felt like the game is punishing you for playing it, as there is nothing you can build to the drillship to adequately defend it from AI attack waves. There didn't seem to be any way to automate repairs, so you end up having to run around your ship repairing things if you don't want anything to break, given how little health all the modules (even later tier ones) have. In other words, it feels like the game is punishing you for even thinking about leaving the ship, unattended, but camping it with repairs is not what I'd imagine to be the intended experience here. We actually ended up skipping the last ship length expansion because it seemed unmanageable, running around three compartments already took long enough.
- Making it so you need lower tier resources to craft higher tier modules (at least when advancing tiers the first time) seems like a gimmick that forces you to spend a lot of time traveling around different tier zones, feels like I'm playing Albion online again (which had it by design). Making lower tier resources available via some means in higher tier areas, or shortcuts between zones (T3 to T1 directly without passing T2 for example) would make this better.

The ship defense in particular seems like an area that could be made a lot more engaging, as it was, we ended up using remote control to send it underground when we left the ship to move around as the constant AI sieges against it would slowly destroy it regardless of what defenses were set up. So we ended up avoiding the ship defense fights almost entirely near the end game as it just made no sense.

All in all, not great, not terrible, definitely a lot better than some other early access titles of the genre.

good game

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Easily over 100 hours of content

Dungeon Defenders: Awakened seems to be mostly a downgrade of what the original game was. It's not a bad game, but if you're looking for a dungeon defender's experience, I would recommend going with Dungeon Defenders II or the original game instead.