Din's Curse Reviews

I looked into Din's Curse after reading some reviews of it. The novelties it brings - randomized worlds, dynamic events, time-sensitive quests - are all extremely interesting and full of exciting potential. Unfortunately, the game never rises to meet said potential. After playing through two and a half towns I feel as though I've more or less gotten the idea. Go to a town, win and fail some quests, occasionally have to rush back to town to defend an attack... rinse and repeat. If the dynamic events were held together by something even resembling a storyline, or some more interesting characters, this game would probably be nothing short of incredible. But as it stands - it's just another bare-bones Action RPG clickfest with a few interesting features that are borderline gimmicks. If you know you love Action RPGs then by all means, check this one out. It's certainly not bad insofar as the genre goes. But if you were hoping, like me, for a new take on what has long ago become a worn-out genre, then think again: at best, Din's Curse can be an interesting experiment in which you can invest a couple of hours, but nothing more.

If you enjoy action RPG's primarily for their mechanics, this game is easily one of the best. Your job is to rescue towns by fulfilling various, randomly-generated quests, most of which have you delving deep into multifloor, randomly-generated dungeons. While you're doing this, any number of events within the town can occur. For example, individuals may get in a fight; the town may be attacked by monsters; merchants may arrive with new goods. It's striaghtforward and simple, but the real draw of this game comes from the many ways you can alter the gameplay. There are several character classes, each with three variants, each with their own small skill trees. You can also create a class. As for the worlds themselves, you can determine the level at which enemies spawn, how often events occur, how often other NPC's attempt to solve quests (they can, and sometimes do succeed). You can pay to take back stat points and skill points, allowing you to dynamically customize and re-customize your character as you're playing. There is very little you can't directly change. There is also the option for permadeath, if you want a greater challenge. The DLC is absolutely worth it. It only adds more content, and does so seamlessly. The only downside is the graphical presentation - this game is passable, but not particularly good looking. The UI works, but could do with having some elements closer together - on a large monitor, you might find yourself having to shift attention away from your character in order to keep track of their health, which means getting caught by surprise in some of the harder floors. I'm not particularly bothered by it, as the gameplay is worth the occasional trouble, but if you've a very large monitor you'd probably benefit from scaling it to a different aspect ratio. Overall, I very much enjoy this game. It's worth the price even without a sale.

This is an amazing game. If you loved Diablo or Fate, this is like an upgraded version of those. Not only can you dungeon delve and kill tons of monsters, but the townspeople need your help as well. People can starve to death, fight each other, plot against the town, ect. No one is safe, not even quest givers or vendors. Down in the dungeon, monsters can swarm you from all sides, especially if there is dimensional gateways that constantly spawn monsters. If you are not careful, quests can pile up, monsters start uprisings and try to invade the town, various machines can cause harmful or strange effects, like causing tornados in the town. Loot is completey random, and the various classes are fun to play, especially hybrids. Din's Curse and it's slightly different game, Depths of Peril are must buys.

Just picked up Din's Curse during the sale and figured I would give it a shot. Played it for a few hours... pretty much addicted to it now. It's basically Diablo or Titan Quest. If you're already a fan of those type of games, you owe it to yourself to try this one out. This was absolutely a thrill to play. Everything seems to work. The graphics are a bit dated, but by looking at the release date this is about a 6 year old game. The loot was pretty good here as well, it was always interesting to know what each magic item's attributes were. It's just the same as the Diablo series, it's always worth identifying your equipment in case you get something special. It almost felt slightly crazier loot-wise than Diablo, as they would sometimes get items that Blizzard wouldn't dare give you at a low level, like gloves that add +56 damage when your weapon is only like 5-10 damage. It doesn't even feel imbalanced or anything like that, since the difficulty ramps up quite quickly, it's just a huge bonus when you find something awesome. There's something this game does differently which I had not seen before. It sort of just throws quests at you like crazy to the point where you are having to find food for everyone in town one at a time. It felt like Fallout 4 where the whole settlement needed your help, where normally in Diablo you would not have to fend for anyone but yourself, typically. Also it seems like everyone in the town had a busy-quest for me. Usually quite simple like killing some foes, activating a button, etc, but the fact that you have seemingly random generation on quests is something that I haven't seen from one of these types of games. Usually the game comes with a bunch of quests and that's it. Not so sure about this game. Seems like they changed enough aspects of the game to make it really unique. I'd love to see if there is a multiplayer community for this game! I see it is supported, but I haven't tried it out yet. All in all, I'm super impressed. Go out and buy this game!

This is Diablo, only with a fifth of the plot- all action. You are probably going to die. A lot. And so will all the townspeople relying upon you, their hero, for safety. All because, in "Din's Curse," the bosses fight back.Slowly but surely, they gather power and influence, staging ambushes upon the town while you're down in the dungeon or shopping for more armor. You will die a lot, but it's great fun. Highly recommended for any fan of Diablo, Torchlight, or Titan's Quest; try the demo if you're unsure.

You might think I'm full of indie-loving hype when I say this game improves on games like Diablo and Torchlight. Hear me out. The game starts where the usual procedural-world action RPG leaves off. You've got your random dungeons, insane varieties of loot, and several classes with interesting skills (not really skill trees, but kinda). And there's the ability to create your own class by combining the skill "trees" of other classes. Tons of options, including completely unique and unusual game modes. Stuff to keep you from getting bored. So, right there, you'd have a really solid, high-quality action RPG. But then - THEN - things get really interesting. When this is referred to as a "dynamic world", it's not just that it's randomly generated and that you can change things. No. The world reacts TO you, and will act in spite of you. The evil bad guys down in the lower levels of the dungeon will gain power, have their plans go forward (if that's what's happening...), and do terrible things to the town if you aren't actively responding to problems. The NPCs have their own problems - whether dealing with a zombie curse or having someone committing murders, or having the monsters from the dungeon suddenly attack. You can defend them. Maybe. You can equip them so they can defend themselves. Or maybe, shamefully, you may find yourself cowering in a lower dungeon level waiting for the carnage above in the city to come to an end so you'll be whisked away by the god Din from this failure to a new town, because you absolutely can fail to save a town. I've put many dozens of hours into this game, and there's a lot I haven't seen / tried yet. It's just a really cool, big, fascinating, fun game with so many permutations that keep it interesting. It may not be the last RPG you ever buy, or the best you've ever played, but it's a great one to jump into for a fun "fix" that stays fun and keeps holding surprises for you for a very long time.

I really wanted to like this game. I could look past the low-poly models, the awkward texturing, the clunky animations, the garish particle effects, the simplistic UI, the bland music, and the jarring sound effects... If ONLY the game was fun to play. For the most part, it's like any other Diablo clone you might have played. Sometimes the movements and attack animations feel kind of sluggish, but it's the same kind of point-and-click combat accompanied by a lot of randomly-generated loot, and other random factors. But I consider that one of the biggest flaws in the game: TOO much is left up to random chance. You get a random town with random NPCs, a random dungeon with a random monster pool and a random number of floors (generally from about 5 to about 20) and you're given random quests to kill a specific monster, kill several lesser monsters, recover or destroy a random quest item, or find and/or rescue somebody from a random floor. All of which would be FINE, if the game didn't leave SO MUCH up to chance. For example, if you get a quest to meet an NPC in the dungeon, you have to reach the floor they're on, then HOPE you find them almost immediately, because they can and will be attacked by any monsters that happen to spawn near them. And 9 times out of 10, they'll be killed by the monsters, forcing you to fail the quest. Now, failing one quest like that isn't the end of the world, but it feels like you just aren't given a fair chance, and it's one of many factors reflecting this game's lack of polish. A lot of reviewers praise the fact that you can fail any quest, any NPC can die, and you can even fail to save whatever town you're on from ruin. This isn't a bad idea in theory, but there's no way to gauge how well you're doing or how safe the town is until people start dying off and it's practically too late to help. It's true that failing to kill a "boss" enemy before an arbitrary time limit means he'll start raising minions and sending troops and assassins into the town, but there isn't much you can do to expedite that quest. It comes to a point where you're fighting a constant tide of new quests, compounded by attacks on the town, which keep you from reaching deeper floors of the dungeon, since you have to constantly return to the surface. The enemies just teleport directly into the town. It would be nicer if they had to physically travel there, so you could intercept them or cut them off, or SOMEhow take preventative action against them, but all you can do is grind along on each quest as you would normally have done. If one of my quests involved killing a boss monster on floor 15, and I was only on floor 5 or so, I would sometimes just let the monsters destroy the town and move on to a new one, because these randomly generated quests were asking far too much of me. I knew I would not only be constantly traveling back to town to kill invaders, but also that new quests in other deep floors of the dungeon would be constantly arising, just as unreachable as the first, and compounding the attacks on the town. People throw around words like "consequences" and "stakes" in praise of this game, but failing to save a town has pretty much negligible consequences. You lose some reputation and you move on to a new town. Losing one or two has no major impact on the overall game, so there's not much motivation to protect them when they're so easily disposable. Another problem is that a town becomes "saved" after you complete a randomly-selected arbitrary quest, and there's no way of knowing which one it will be. You might kill the boss monster, break his evil altar, destroy an uprising of skeletons, recover an evil artifact, and cure the town's poisoned water supply, but none of those things might "save" the town. Instead, the game might decide that the town is "saved" when you gather items for the townspeople to construct a lightning totem in the town. There's no way of knowing what your "main" quest is, because it looks like any other random task. But all that happens when you "save" a town is that you're allowed to move on to a new one. The dungeon is still full of monsters, and all the other pre-existing quests can still be done (in fact, more will continue to spring up as long as you stay in the town) and you need not even reach the final floor of the dungeon. I found it weird when I saved my first town having only been to 10 of the dungeon's 12 floors. So, these might be some pretty frustrating game design choices, but by far the most frustrating thing turned out to be the combat. I played as a summoning character, which I usually find fun in games like these. But the monsters' AI is so dreadful, playing a summoner is practically useless. I had my minions set to "aggressive" but they seemed to just do whatever they wanted. Sometimes they would completely ignore enemies, even as I fought them, sometimes they would attack an enemy once and then run away for no reason, and worst of all, they LOVED to stand in narrow hallways, blocking my path when I needed to escape from enemies. But worse than that is the enemies' ability to stun you. Certain enemies with special attacks, or even ordinary enemies getting critical hits, apparently, can stun you, meaning you are 100% immobilized and unable to make any attacks or use any skills for a good three seconds. At higher levels, this is plenty of time for a swarm of monsters to surround you, stunlock you, and slowly whittle away at all of your health as you cannot possibly break through the crowd or drink potions fast enough to keep yourself alive. All you can do is sit there and watch your character slowly die. I'm perfectly fine with a game being difficult, but this game just comes across as sloppy. The difficulty is unfair and unbalanced, as a result of some very clunky combat mechanics and far too much of the quests being left up to random chance. Speaking of which, there is no real narrative or over-arching final objective to "beat" the game. Just a big disorganized pile of infinite towns, infinite dungeons, and infinite quests. I was eventually given the "gain your freedom" quest, which I took to be something a little different, signaling an "end" to the game, even though I was only about level 18. But the objective was just to kill another randomly-generated boss monster. And after I did it, nothing changed. I didn't gain an especially substantial reward, I still had my same pile of quests from the townspeople, and the game invited me to do some more of them... Forever. Even worse, actually, is that I FAILED the "gain your freedom" quest on my first attempt, and the town was eventually destroyed. But then I moved on to a new town, and the quest was immediately made available to me again. My failure of this seemingly-important quest had zero impact on my game. I just did it again. If you're looking for a Diablo clone/action RPG/dungeon crawler, you can do a lot better, even just on steam. I'd recommend either of the Torchlight games, Titan Quest, or even Fate (a similarly unpolished-feeling game) before I would recommend this one.

"Choose one of 141 class combinations and journey to an infinite number of dynamically generated towns with vastly different problems." -- Enough said. Sold. Seriously though, for the price (<$3 USD on sale) hopefully you can get a "few" hours of fun out of the game. It's somewhat a mix between Torchlight (on steroids) and tower defense (in this case town-defense) with some harder RPG elements (character building, limited inventory (very) and traps, for starters). One thing really nice about the game is you can really customize the difficulty level. So far I have turned off the timed quests/town attacks until I learn how to navigate and manage loot in an efficient manner. That the NPCs and quests vary is pretty neat, (since they also have consequences for failure) and more impacting than say a random Torchlight map. Lastly, be prepared to die. It is a bit rogue-lite (if you have town attacks on esp.) but you keep your equipment and level. This isn't the type of game I usually play (real-time, no save etc. but am branching out.) I'm pretty pleased with it especially for the price. It can be quite addicting or something just played a bit when you feel like it. Also, there are mods, which I have yet to explore.

To me, this is what an ARPG should be. If you like messing around with different character builds, killing stuff, collecting gear with little story or exploration to slow you down, give this a go. PLEASE don't look too much at the screenshots or videos, just download the demo and give it a try. It's only 100MB or so, and it plays way better than it looks. If you like the ARPG genre, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

This is a fun little RPG. It's hugely replayable, as every town is different and you have to do different things to save each town (most of these are "Kill X monster", "Destroy X Machine", or "Collect X Items", but they're just slightly different enough to stay interesting). There are some flaws in the game, the graphics are extremely dated and can be glitchy, and townspeople behave like idiots (starving to death when 1 copper piece in debt, charging towards high level invading monsters with poor weaponry and armor, standing motionless while a tornado is heading straight for them, and so on. Worse is that you suffer a reputation penalty even when they die in stupid ways). The monster AI seems pretty rudimentary as well, once they're aggro-ed, they run in a straight line after you and attack in predictable ways. However, even with the flaws, it's still a solidly fun game and you can get engrossed in it pretty easily