I’m not a big gamer, I am much more of a gambler with fi.slotzo.com, but just like the rest of the Dads, I’ve been waiting a long time for the release of Dungeon Hack and Slashers: Diablo III and Torchlight II (not into Skyrim yet). Up to now, I’ve been biding my time with iPad and iPhone slashers like Dungeon Hunter by Gameloft. Well, that all ended today with the release of Dungeon Hunter III.
With Dungeon Hunter II, they made the game multiplayer and added class specifications to the three major classes. The game was pretty good, but game play was a little too short. You could easily finish the game on one charge of the iPad. But it was true to the genre made popular by Diablo and by the time you had run through the dungeons on Insanity mode kitted out to the gills and levelling up to 60+ you knew the game had been a good. And for $6.99 it was a pretty good bargain too.
So you can imagine my surprise when Dungeon Hunter III showed up in the iTunes App Store this morning for FREE. This should have my been my first clue that something was a amidst. Usually the free stuff is littered with ads and cheap grabs to get you to buy in game extras in order to the play the game better. The next clue was when I was asked to sign up for notifications the minutes the games loaded; this is bad on so many levels. Notifications for iOS games have become the premier method of SPAMMING users to get them to play their other games or to buy add ons. And finally, the game introduction turned into a 10 minutes game play tutorial littered with more instructions on how you can “enhance” you game-play by buy armour, weapons and skills that you could usually get just by playing the ACTUAL game.
When I finally was able to play the game, it became blazingly obvious that the franchise was lost. They have totally stripped the storyline, the side quests and… oh yeah, the WHOLE POINT OF THE GAME.
Shame on you GameLoft… For this cheap attempt at a shameless Zinga style money grab. My only fear is that this will become an ongoing trend with other iOS game developers.
Oh yeah and its super buggy too…
