Dauntless Review – A storefront pretending to be a game

I would love to be an unbiased writer. A writer that doesn’t have prejudice or preconceived ideas about things that I haven’t even tried yet. I’d love to be a writer that can objectively review a game and report back in a fashion that provides a library worth of information based off of stats and not feelings.

Today however, I am not that writer. You see, I gave Monster Hunter World a review a short while back and if you read it, you’d have seen that it was glowing. I play Monster Hunter World every day. I am on Facebook and WhatsApp groups about Monster Hunter. I follow speed run pages on Instagram for Monster Hunter. If I’m not playing Monster Hunter, I’m on some Reddit page looking up facts about Monster Hunter.

I am a Monster Hunter Fanboy. If you want an unbiased review, stop reading this.

Now, with my little disclaimer out the way, I thought we could get to the actual review.

Whenever someone says, “free to play”, I get a rush of blood to the head (both of them, if you know what I mean).

A FREE GAME. What a bargain. I mean, Apex Legends was free, and it is an epic game (see what I did there?) Despite it having micro-transactions, the focus is the game play. The micro-transactions aren’t pay to win, nor are they shoved down your throat. I respect Apex Legends and so I do not disregard FTP games as a whole, because Respawn (amongst other dev's) have proven that you can have a free to play game without having micro-transactions forced on you like a sick person’s cough in an elevator.

I get that same rush of blood as I mentioned above, when I hear the words, “cross-platform”. Those who know me, know that I am a PS fanboy, however I love gaming with my mates who have made poor life choices and invested their money in the wrong console, or even worse - A PC. Despite their bad choice in platform, they’re my mates and I enjoy gaming alongside them.

So, having said that, why the *begins cursing indistinctly* has Dauntless literally done so many things wrong, despite being FTP and cross platform?

Here’s my issue – I’ve hated rip off’s ever since my cheap circumcision many years ago, and if I’m being honest, Dauntless is the most blatant rip off I’ve ever seen. I don’t recall who said it, but one Facebook user described Dauntless most eloquently, “It’s like Monster Hunter and Fortnite had a baby and the baby shit itself”.

Literally.

It isn’t even like Dauntless kept the best features from Fortnite and Monster Hunter either. It kept the worst features from both and threw the good features into the same trash can that it crawled out of.

However, in the spirit of being an objective writer, I won’t compare it to Monster Hunter anymore. Instead, let’s do an overview of the game itself, without bias (LOL).

At first glance, the game is actually quite nice to look at. Its art style is one that I like, and despite all my hate for Fortnite, I have always defended its art style. There is nothing wrong, in my opinion, with developers ditching the “hyper realistic” graphic style and creating their own art style, further investing players in that particular world. Look at something like Borderlands. Something completely different in appearance that, for whatever reason, works. The style of the world gives it that distinct “Borderlands” feel. In the same way, I feel that Dauntless uses a distinct style to set itself apart. It’s bright colors, carefully placed on top of the soft edges of its world are surprisingly inviting.

Source: wallpapercave.com

In similar fashion, the armor and weapons are very attractive. They look bad-ass and even combining parts from several pieces of armor, doesn’t make the set look mismatched or out-of-sorts, which can be a downside to RPG's with huge aesthetic focus – lower level players in other games are forced to walk around looking like they just went shopping in a discount store and still didn’t have enough money to buy a complete outfit, so they went dumpster diving.

Having said that, I feel as though that’s the beauty of RPG’s - you’re supposed to look like the noob that you are. You’re supposed to get an overwhelming sensation of pride when you finish farming a really cool (complete) set of high-level armor. If you don’t have to work for one of the fundamental aspects of the game, it feels cheap.

Speaking of cheap, let’s talk about the combat mechanics.

Source: playdauntless.com

The combat mechanics are a huge portion of this genre of game, so I think it’s important that we break down each aspect and discuss in detail.

Let’s begin with the frame lag. Even in the game’s main hub, the game doesn’t run smoothly. When in combat, this issue is exasperated further. I’m not sure if this is because of the cross-platform play, the fact that there are four people from different countries fighting the same monster (or “Behemoth” as Dauntless calls them) or that the game is just too labor intensive on my console (or perhaps a combination of all of them) but I found it incredibly hard to find any sort of rhythm when in combat because of this.

The second issue that I had was the unbalanced weapons. As I mentioned above, the weapons look really cool, but this doesn’t help the fact that some weapons felt incredibly easy to use and do damage with, while others were just unbearably painful to use.

The Chain Blades for example, have long and short-range attacks. Both the long and short-range attacks were easy to string combos with and did reasonable damage, even with early game builds. The “dodge” mechanism on the Chain Blades are a “rift through space” style dodge, which gives a massive advantage in combat.

The Axe on the other hand, is slow and hard to chain combos with. The damage transferred by successful hits are nowhere near where they should be, when compared to the other weapons and the damage that those weapons deal vs speed at which they deal the damage.

The Axe utilizes the standard “duck and roll” dodging mechanism, which would be fine, if it didn’t take incredibly long to work (which would also be fine, if there was some sort of tank feature that Axe players had, where less damage was taken on hits, but even that was something overlooked). This kind of imbalance is forgivable on games like Soulsborne where there is a large stock of weapons to choose from to suit any play style, but when there are only five weapons to choose from, this oversight just feels lazy.

I’ll quickly jump back to referencing Monster Hunter - in MH World, there are 14 weapons to choose from, each with dozens of weapon trees to choose from (not including various augments and custom builds) and yet, they all feel incredibly balanced. So balanced in fact, that very seldom do you find two players using the same weapon. In Dauntless, this is not the case.

Even with the imbalance on the weapons, the game play is incredibly forgiving. Despite one of the key features in the combat system being iFrame (invincibility when rolling), the damage you take from behemoths is incredibly low, with very little to no stun or elemental damage being taken when hit. For newer players trying to get into this type of game, it can be awesome to have this kind of “leniency”, but veterans of this genre will find themselves bored after just a few hunts as button smashing combos seems to be the focus over tactical play.

Despite the above issues, with some fine tuning and tweaking, the game is not broken. Weapon balancing is not something that a lot of dev’s have refined on game launch. Frame lag can be fixed, dependent on the issues causing it and damage ranges can be adjusted as the community provides more feedback.

There are two factors however, that I don’t see being fixed any time soon. These are two features that seem to be at the games foundation.

The first factor is how easy the game is. The game feels like it was designed to give players quick, easy to earn rewards and gratification. I believe that they did this to capture more casual players, who are looking for quick wins, as opposed to having to grind 100+ hours to feel any sense of accomplishment. They are looking to lock players in at the start of the game (something that most other games in the genre do not do).

The second factor is something that I feel is unforgivable and would ultimately be the downfall of any, otherwise great game. This is the micro-transactions and the manor in which they are forced down your throat. I cannot understand how I am able to access the shop in the game menu, inventory, pre-game hub and have the shop forced on me by NPC’s in cut scenes as well. There are actually “missions” where you are rewarded for claiming from the season pass. It’s a clear indication that all of the issues I have mentioned were either overlooked or intentional because making a good game was never the primary objective - making money was.

In summary (and despite my jokes about being bias) I really did attempt to be as objective about Dauntless as I could be, but there are so many things that I felt that they did wrong. I wholeheartedly believe that Phoenix Lab saw how successful free to play games had been in the last few years and wanted a piece of the pie. They had the idea to go FTP in a genre that had only a small amount of contention for them and monetize “all the things”, while targeting the game at a market who are not massive fans of the genre and had no problem disregarding those that are.

I downloaded this game for the review, but to be honest, as surely as I will be clicking "post" on this article once I’ve finished writing it, I will be clicking “delete” on Dauntless on my PS4.

Shot a lot LEGENDS!

Gray (Editor)

GT (PS): n2ut14

IG: graybland14