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Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground (PSP)

• Developer:
• Publisher: XSEED Games
• Genre: Role Playing
• Official Website: http://www.dungeonmakerhuntingground.com
• Score: 4 of 5: Niche

Old pants can be considered a double entrée of comfort and tradition. It's amazing how one can feel when you get home from work and change into your favorite pair of jeans. For others, a great pair of pants becomes a part of their history and no matter how worn, torn, or frayed the pants become the owner is unable to let go. Which brings me to the dungeon crawler; a part of gaming history that brings comfort to many gamers. We never seem to tire of endlessly raiding countless dungeons in the hopes of finding rare loot and monsters. Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground offers gamers the chance to keep repairing those old, worn out jeans back to new again, forever.

Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground proves that sometimes the name of the game is really all you need to know. Simply put, this game is all about you designing, maintaining, and upgrading your own dungeon. You're a warrior living in a town who has decided to renovate a dungeon located just outside of the city. The point of the renovation is to lure various monsters and hopefully the legendary Wandering Demon. You don't just build a massive dungeon full of rooms and hallways. Instead you have to be as elaborate as possible with the dungeon with renovations such as wood flooring, water fountains, bed rooms and other enhancements to keep monsters interested in your dungeon. Once the monsters are in your dungeon then it's up to you and only you (remember you're the landlord) to clean out the monsters, collect items, and money.

The town of Dungeon Maker is a small town with only a few stores, buildings, and characters to visit. You have the typical merchants that sell weapons, armor, magic spells, and food. There is one specific merchant which sells an assortment of building materials you can use to renovate your dungeon. The game starts off with a small collection of enhancements and gradually builds up its inventory with special materials. Some characters in the game even offer you building materials as rewards for taking on certain quests for them, usually something simple such as recover "x" item for me from your dungeon. There is only one town in the game and most of the characters remain constant throughout the entire game.

Gameplay wise Dungeon Maker offers a very straightforward approach to building a dungeon. When you reach a wall in the game you press the Triangle button to bring up a menu option to add a new hallway, room or enhancement. If you don't like what you've done to a room you can always change the room back to its default look or remove the room entirely. Once you've run out of building material you either have to purchase additional material or you can redesigned the dungeon completely. The combat in the game is just as basic with just an attack and block option along with the ability to use magic. Visually the game looks great in the town with the standard Japanese anime avatar look for all of the characters. In the dungeon the graphics hit a brick wall with a bland, generic look to your character, monsters, and the dungeon itself.

Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground can definitely be considered a niche title because it will please certain gamers while boring just as many. You could call this the ultimate dungeon crawler since you are the dungeon master, so to speak, whose job is to build the most elaborate dungeon possible to attract monsters. Sometimes the enhancements just seem ridiculous such as adding wood grain paneling. Of course the gameplay is the classic dungeon crawler mix of killing and looting which can be a blessing or curse, depending on your preference. For a PSP game, Dungeon Maker fits into the same mold as the countless other RPGs available for the system. They have their audience who love them and that's all that matters.

Jul 17, 2007 | 0 comments
Brian