Dungeon Defenders: Awakened by developer and publisher Chromatic Games—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
If there’s one title that could be considered a guilty pleasure at this point, it would be Chromatic Games’ Dungeon Defenders series. Having been playing since the original launch, having covered the launch of the sequel and of Awakened’s own relaunch, this tower defense action RPG has made its way back over to the consoles with some new content.
The concept of Dungeon Defenders way back when was a crazy one. Mixing in a tower defense style with action RPG elements meant that you were no longer simply in the passenger seat. Now, you had a front row seat to setting up your defenses and then aiding them as waves of monsters are unleashed with one goal. To destroy your crystals.
To defend your crystals, you’ll have access to several characters which also act as classes with different attacks, special abilities and defense types. What I’ve always enjoyed with the character class selection is that there is something for everyone. Want to be up close and tanky? Squire is for you. Want to be ranged while having towers? Apprentice. Ranged and something a bit more flashy with exploding traps? Huntress. Up close and personal but on your own terms while slowing down enemies with an aura? The Monk has your back. Adding in the other characters such as the Dryad Warden, the Android Series EV-A Unit and the Dark Elf Rogue, there’s more choice and variety to be had.
The inclusion of these classes is something that I thought had been missing when Dungeon Defenders Awakened had first launched since the Series EV had been an original DLC character alongside a Barbarian that I would still love to see make a return alongside a Jester and Summoner. All together though, these characters can create some interesting defense combinations whether playing by yourself, as you can now have a hero deck of 6, or with others and concentrating all of your earned experience on one specific hero.
Looking back over my Dungeon Defenders: Awakened review for the PC, there are still some issues that haven’t yet been addressed that I wonder if they will be at this point. Playing with a controller has become much smoother than it was but the inventory was still a mess, if not worse with a controller as there was no select all option. Furthermore, the tavern is still bare and honestly I wonder why it’s being used since there are still no merchants or pet venders for certain cosmetics that existed in the original version all those years ago.
In terms of content, there are plenty of different modes to challenge yourself and others with. From the default campaign over survival which pits you against ever increasing difficult waves, challenges where you have to win through specific rule sets, pure strategy that you have to sit back and hope your traps do the trick and then a mixed mode to swap everything up a bit survival style. There are tons of maps and depending on the difficulty, hours upon hours of tower defense fun as a normal stage can go for 10-20 minutes depending on the spawn time so it makes it easy to do a few in between other gaming or waiting for your party to be ready.
And that’s really it at this point in time though I was happy to see some of the updates that have been done since the last time I dove into Eternia in order to defend the world’s crystals. Better yet, there is also more upcoming content so it looks like Dungeon Defenders Awakened is here to stay for a while. I just hope that some of the items listed above could be addressed to make certain elements feel more lively and useful because the original tavern was definitely an adventurer’s go to for everything.
Overall though, Dungeon Defenders Awakened for the consoles was enjoyable enough on the big screen and brings plenty of Tower Defense goodness for console players as it is also available on the Nintendo Switch and Microsoft’s Xbox.
Score: 7.5 / 10
