“Lightning Ball!”
“I’ve got it.”
“Nice shot, right between the eyes.”
“Get the tail, it is already wounded.”
“Ugh, it just rolled on me, reviving.”
“Hack that tail, it should come off soon.”
“God, it hits hard. Danger meter at 80%.”
“I’m dead, pull me up.”
“Danger meter 95%.”
“The tail is almost off…I can feel it…Just a little bit more…”
“I’m dead.”
“Damn, me too.”
“Should have gone for the head.”
Imagine a world pandemic, unlike anything we have experienced before. Imagine being stuck at home for weeks, not knowing when you’ll be able to go out again. Luckily, you are an introvert who is into boardgames and videogames, so the prospect of everybody leaving you alone does not sound bad at all. However, you most likely have extroverted friends/relatives, and you pity their suffering and want to help. The solution is easy, let’s play a videogame together! Okay, but how do you pick the right game? What if your friend is a console peasant while you have a magnificent custom-built PC? What if your friend usually just plays FIFA and doesn’t have the necessary gamer instincts/reflexes/background knowledge to start something long and epic like Divinity Original Sin 2? All in all, you need a casual-friendly game that allows you to connect different platforms and that hopefully doesn’t cost too much. Fear not, my friend, Dauntless is here to the rescue!
First of all, Dauntless is free, so there really isn’t an argument for not giving a try. Second of all, it allows you to connect up to four players across platforms, and as far as I can tell you can play it on pretty much anything: Xbox, PS, Switch, and PC. Now let’s see how the gameplay holds up.
The concept of Dauntless is pretty simple, you are a monster slayer who travels from weird-floating-island-with-a-unique-microclimate to weird-floating-island-with-a-unique-microclimate, kills behemoths and harvests their parts and does pit stops at Ramsgate, the main city in the world of Dauntless.
The hunt itself takes place on an island which is a glorified boss arena. Your task is to find the monster chilling in its natural habitat and then kill it. While searching you can pick up different resources, like plants and ores that you can use for crafting in the city. Once one of you spots the prize you converge on the behemoth and the fight begins.
The combat system is not terribly complicated. There are seven types of monsters: neutral, blaze, frost, shock, terra, radiant, and umbral. Elemental behemoths are weak against attacks from an element that counters their own, and armor crafted from their own element protects better against attacks from them. For example, to fight a blaze monster you’ll want a blaze armor and a frost weapon. Pretty basic.
There are no classes, all your abilities depend on your gear. Your armor gives you passive abilities, like stamina regeneration and life steal, while your weapon determines your fighting skills. There is a good variety available for you to pick from, there are big swords, axes, hammers, war pikes, chain blades, and even guns. Each weapon has its own unique style. Hammers are slow but do high stagger damage, war pikes are quick and do high wound damage, sword and axes are good for hacking off tails, and guns shoot.
You level up your skill for each weapon category by using that weapon, so you’ll want to pick a main type a stick with it. Once you have your main killing instrument you can craft different versions of it for each elemental damage category.
The time between hunts is spent on faffing around in the city. You can craft weapons and armor from the hacked-off bodyparts, brew potions and grenades, chase hawk feathers, talk to NPCs, get missions, and jump over the head of other players. Once you are done, you get the gang back together, go kill another monster, and the cycle starts anew.
The Good
This game is so casual that it deserves praise. A hunt takes about twenty minutes and the behemoth scales with the number of players so you don’t have to have a full four-player party, it is the ideal setup for busy adults. It is also relaxing. Most multiplayer games are tense and you usually end up screaming at each other but not in Dauntless. You chat about your day, what you had for lunch, the newest Netflix hit, and just generally have fun. It is ideal for norms/non-gamers since it is just soooo easy to get started.
Dauntless is also free and surprisingly not cash-grabby. I fully expected it to be a pay-to-win kind of a game, but it isn’t. You can fully enjoy the core game without spending a nickel.
The visuals are also cool, designed really well, from the cool photo-worthy arrival of your group to the stylized cartoonish monsters. The weapons are over-the-top and flashy, and the armors look amazing. I personally really do want to collect all the available gear, just all of them. There is an armor that only gives utility bonuses, which I don’t like and doesn’t go well with my playstyle, but the armor looks like steampunk wizard gear, so I wear it.
The hunts are fun, there are some really epic and tense fights. Some monster moves can be interrupted with a heavy attack, and I have to tell you, slapping a giant owl beast out of the sky when it wants to swoop down on you feels wonderful. Or hitting back giant balls of lightning. Or smacking a huge horned fire dog across its face.
The dynamics are simple enough at the beginning, and get gradually more difficult as you fight higher and higher level monsters. Overall I feel like it is really easy to get into the combat but it is hard to master it. We’ll see how we do on higher-level hunts.
There is also a variety of hunts you can do. You can pursue specific monster species, go on patrols for a random behemoth of a given elemental type, or embark on escalations. Escalations are our favourite. It is four back-to-back battles, sometimes fighting two monsters at the same time with increasing difficulty. There is no wondering around searching for the behemoth, no plant gathering, no ore mining, just pure boss fights.
The Bad
I think the best way to summarize Dauntless is that it is fine. It is steady. The highest highs and the lowest lows are not too far from each other. Therefore if you would compare the combat system to something like Bloodborne, Dauntless would seem slow and boring.
It feels like a poor man’s version of Monster Hunter World, not that we have actually tried Monster Hunter World. But Dauntless is definitely simpler, no talent trees, fewer armor- and weapon types, fewer monster types, lower difficulty.
I mentioned that the game doesn’t feel too cash-grabby, but ads do pop-up, especially at the beginning. Once you are over the tutorial missions it gets better, but at the start you have to click through several pop-ups showing all the cool things you can buy using the in-game currency. There is a whole section of the menu, your personality, where every single item is locked down. You can get a new banner, a new arrival emote, a new hair colour, but it all costs money. Oh well, the game is free, so they’ll get a pass.
It is also…too shiny? Too facebooky? You get a badge for everything you do, you opened a letter, here’s a shiny dingle-mingle, every few seconds you get something new, but those thingies don’t actually matter in the game. It is well within the bearable range though.
Based on the aesthetics and the constant sparkly ads it feels like we are not the target audience. But then the game is sooooooo accommodating for busy adults that I am going to ignore that.
Lastly, the game is buggy sometimes. There is a built-in My Character is Stuck help in the Menu, so that is a good indicator of how often that happens. Usually it is fine, though one time my character spent the entire hunt constantly falling. Like Loki at the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok.
The Co-Op
At the end of the day taking down a monster is a team effort. You need to harmonize the arsenal you are bringing so you can do a variety of damage, focus your efforts on whichever body parts you want to hack off first, coordinate buffs, potions, and revive each other when necessary.
In the city you’ll want to check-in on each other’s quest and gear progress, figure out who needs what body parts for their upgrades, and ultimately decide what to kill next together.
The Recommendation
Yes, to paraphrase the quote from Rogue One: all you can lose is time. Dauntless is a free, fun, and easy game, with satisfying combat and gear crafting. Don’t expect anything huge or life-changing, just solid fun.
Info
| Release Year | 2019 |
| Genre | Hack and Slash |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 20 - 30 minutes per hunt |
Rating
| Overall | Good |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Good |