Burn Through Your Wallet With Dungeon Hunter 4!

On my flight to Disneyland I needed a distraction, so I downloaded Dungeon Hunter 4 by Gameloft.  It is a free-to-play Diablo clone for mobile devices.  The game starts off very fun, but then when you just start to really get in to it the free-to-play gimmicks weigh it down.

The story follows a hero who is trying to save the world from demons.  How does the hero do this you ask?  Why by hacking and slashing his or her way through multitudes of enemies of coarse.

The game is very simple in premise.  The more bad guys you kill, the more you level up and the more loot you gain, so you can fight bigger and badder (I know it is not a word) guys.  This works very well in the beginning, but once you get a ways in to the game its shortcomings make their way to the forefront.

To buy health potions you need to spend real money.  To use more then one health potion in a few minutes you need to spend real money, so that means for any of the truly challenging quests you need to show up with a few bucks.  At first this didn’t seem like an issue since you could level up on the easy stuff, and then come back to the challenging areas, but after awhile everything is too hard.  So to win you are going to need to spend some of your hard earned cash.

It is such a shame too because the game plays so well, and it has live multiplayer!  If this game cost five dollars up front it would be a must own.  The controls are great, and the graphics for a mobile game are top notch.  Heck I would even be okay if it was free, and just the upper tier weapons and armor cost money (which they do).  Oh well, this is the new mobile video game world we live in I suppose.

One of these days I will stop playing free-to-play games, but when they are all that seems to be coming out these days for mobile devices they are hard to avoid.  For the first couple of hours Dungeon Hunter 4 is worth your time, but once they ramp up the difficulty pull out your wallet, or just uninstall it.