An oldie but goldie type of game, Dungeon Defenders was released back in 2010 and has gone through several iterations since then with Dungeon Defenders 2, DD: Gone Rogue, and DD: Awakened.
I haven't played through the new ones — Gone Rogue and Awakened — but my partner and I spent quite a bit of time in Dungeon Defenders 1 + 2 back in the day. On our quest to find games to play together co-op that we're both interested in, we mentally went back in time and returned to the first Dungeon Defenders (and bought all the DLC while we were at it).
We didn't bother with the second one because the first one is best. xD
There are four main heroes — an archer, mage, swordsman and monk — but with all the added DLC there is also a barbarian, summoner, and gender-swapped versions of the original characters.
Back in the day I used to play as the Huntress, the archer, simply because she was the only female character. Now I chose to play as the Adept which is the female version of the Apprentice, which is basically the mage.
There is a loose story tied to Dungeon Defenders which I've never paid attention to. All that matters is getting stronger and defeating waves upon waves of angry monsters.
My partner and I started on medium difficulty since it's been so long, and went through the campaign. I the mage and he the new summoner class.
Dungeon Defenders is a tower defense game, and the summoner doesn't get towers! Just minions which basically act like towers but can be controlled to a finer degree. He also doesn't get blockades for defense tactics, so it was up to me to place all the blockades first, then he would go along with his minions, then I could place my towers of destruction down later.
While it was a bit irritating doing it that way, simply because I prefer it when we can both barricade areas and place offensive weapons down at the same time, his minions were worth it, were super strong, and we annihilated the campaign.
There are several levels and bonus missions and challenge missions available, and when you complete them you get a nifty overview of the match. Obviously the goal is to be the MVP and crow about it to whoever you're playing with. XD
As you play and kill all the monsters, they drop so much loot. That was one of the reasons I felt like playing this, actually. I felt like playing a "loot" game and if you want a lot of loot to sift through, this is definitely for you.
The loot comes in form of various weapons, armour, and pets. And each has stats that are either beneficial or detrimental. Because I like to focus on the damage of my towers, I need to look for loot that makes my towers more powerful. My first pet? Had stats that made my towers worse!! Thankfully I got a better pet upon completing the campaign.
You can see mine and my partner's characters and pets in the screenshot above. 😊 Our little guardians that you get when you complete the campaign. There are better pets out there, but they are super expensive.
As you play through each level you earn mana which is the currency as well as your power force, and some pets can cost several millions of mana. I have 650,000. I'm only a brand new character though. xD
This is my character's stats page at the moment. When you get right up there with gear and whatnot, you can get over +1000 in different things, as you can see my character is still very low compared to those who have stats in the thousands! xD
You can upgrade all of your armour and weapons too, using mana, but the cost gets really expensive too so I'm not really upgrading anything until I find really good gear.
Once you finish annihilating all the monsters, you can check the gear you've picked up. Generally a green thumbs up means the gear is better than what you've got on and a red thumbs down means that it's terrible compared... but you really need to have a look at the stats on it.
Sometimes, even though it says that it's better, and it very well may be better in some aspects, if you want to focus on tower damage but the gear has hero damage on it instead, it's really not better. You need to look at it and choose what's good for you and your playstyle.
Whilst we finished the campaign, we're not quite geared enough yet or high enough level to do the other missions just yet so we set the campaign difficulty to Insanity and started going through it again.
We did try the very first level on Nightmare difficulty, the hardest, but we definitely could not do that xD the difficulty ramp-up between Insanity and Nightmare is quite... insane. Probably more for very high level characters.
While I'm enjoying the game again, still after all these years, I do have a couple of complaints. One being that you can't double-jump so it's so easy to get stuck behind all your defenses and get trapped... the other being the game's stylised graphics.
As I've mentioned previously in a couple of other posts, and in comments when talking about stylised graphics, my eyes struggle a bit with stylised graphics. I find it hard to differentiate between enemies, loot and the background, so sometimes I'll run straight past some loot that my partner has seen and is like, "There's a cool staff here, HERE, HEEEREEE!!!!" and it takes me forever to see it.
But that's a "me" problem. I just don't do well with stylised graphics.
Overall I'm enjoying myself though and it's nice to have a game to play co-op with my partner again as it's difficult sometimes to find things we're both interested in. 😛
If you've never played Dungeon Defenders before, I heartily recommend it if you like tower defense games and a lotttttt of loot. I don't remember Dungeon Defenders #2, but it is free-to-play if you'd like to get a feel for the game. And I haven't tried the more recent ones, but intend to at some point in the future.
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 
