Dungeon Defenders

Over the weekend I was browsing the Steam featured sales and saw a game (Deponia) that looked interesting. It was on sale, or you could buy it in a big bundle that was even more on sale. It's like making money! (Only not even close...) I looked through the rest of the bundle, saw a few things that I'd heard good things about (Cave Story, Orcs Must Die! 2, Super Meat Boy, Thirty Flights of Loving) and decided to throw some money away.

I then picked a game pretty much at random to try out. It was Dungeon Defenders which it turns out is a tower defense game built out of a first person shooter engine. I've been a big fan of tower defense style games ever since spending a lot of time playing them with my brother in WarCraft 3. I'm always interesting in seeing what kind of twist people are going to put on the genre and Dungeon Defenders has a pretty good one. There are a bunch of different character classes in the game that can build different types of towers which is to be expected, but you can also play the game as more of a FPSer instead. The game has all the standard RPG things going on with levels, classes, talent trees, equipment, and an upgrade system. You can choose to spend your levels making your towers better or you can choose to level up your personal killing power instead. Add in the fact you can play in a group of 4 people and there's lots of reasons to specialize one way or another. One person can play a tower defense game and some else could play a hack and slash, loot acquisition game.

I started playing in offline mode just to see what was going on and ended up playing 7 hours over the weekend which does bode well for the game. It turns out you can't earn achievements in offline mode (I think it's open for modding) which is a little disappointing and means I should probably restart in online mode. On the plus side then I can play with other people. On the down side most other people are jerks. Eh, you win some, you lose some.

I browsed around a bit today to see if I could figure out how scoring works. There's a leaderboard after each mission and I found my score was a lot lower than other people's scores at the same level. It turns out I spend a lot of time just wandering around picking up terrible loot to vendor and you don't actually need to do that. Any loot you leave on the ground gets automatically vendored for you at the start of the next wave. The map also highlights loot which is 'better' than your current loot in green so you know where to go to pick up potential upgrades. There's also big multiplier score bonuses for not taking any damage to your base crystals and for not taking any damage on your hero which coupled with higher time bonuses would probably help a lot.

So I figure I'm going to restart in online mode. The question is do I play the class I've leveled to 29 already and know how to play or do I go with something new?