Forget Lane Defending, DOFUS: Battles 2 HD Is All About The Attack
DOFUS : Battles 2 HD ($3.99) by Ankama is a sequel to the original DOFUS: Battles game, which is a highly rated lane defense game with elements of real time strategy and roleplaying thrown into the mix.
This sequel is set in the same world, but the gameplay is quite a bit different. While Dofus: Battles was a lane defense game, Dofus: Battles 2 is played in reverse - as a lane attack game.
Essentially, the game is played just like your typical lane defense game (think Plants vs. Zombies) except instead of defending the lane from an assault, you’re the one attacking the enemies at the other end. In fact, you’re fighting the characters that were the heroes in the previous DOFUS game and playing as a super villain in who takes control of monsters.
Gameplay consists of dragging a monster on the board and then tapping the sword button to order it to attack. Monsters will walk in a straight line towards your enemies (the level is divided up into a grid), but you will often need to direct them to attack in other lanes.
To change their attack course, you will need to drag arrows onto each tile on the path in front of them, and tap the arrow to select the right direction. This is a tedious and awkward gameplay mechanic that I didn’t like at all. It would be far better if I could just tap an enemy and have the monster negotiate the best path towards it, or use my finger to draw a path.
Rather than getting coins to buy new monsters to attack, your monsters take summoning points to create, and when one dies, you get the points back to create another, which means you’re limited to a small number of monsters on the board at a time. This is another factor, combined with the pathing, that makes gameplay feel slow.
Slow gameplay wouldn’t bad a bad thing if DOFUS Battles: 2 felt more strategy oriented, but it doesn’t - it just feels like a game with an excessive amount of micromanagement.
To go along with your directional arrows, you also have a hand to stop monsters from progressing forward, a skull to send them to their death (and recoup the cost), and a limited number of hearts which will heal your monsters for five of your summoning points.
Between game levels, there are mini games that you play to capture new monsters, where the goal is to get the balls into the sockets by moving them around on the field.
Patient gamers and those of you who enjoyed the first DOFUS Battles will likely enjoy this reverse lane defense game. I thought it was fun, but slow paced and a bit on the easy side.
My biggest complaint is actually that it’s not universal and that the iPad “HD” version isn’t actually HD - it’s not Retina ready for the newest iPad. It also looks like this game might be slightly unfinished, because while there’s an entry for it in Game Center, it doesn’t look like there are actually any achievements or leaderboard rankings showing up in Game Center.
DOFUS: Battles 2 definitely needs a few updates (like Retina support and universal access) to be worth its $3.99 purchase price, but I’d suggest giving it a try with the lite version.
