Dungeon Twister Review

The problem with board games is that you have to set them up before you start and clean 'em up when you're done. The popular board game Dungeon Master is now out on PlayStation Network, saving you the trouble of all that work. Unfortunately, this adaptation fails to take advantage of the freedom offered by the format, with bland visuals that do little to improve on the experience of looking at an actual game board. Toss in crashes and the absence of any board game's most important feature--local multiplayer--and this version will leave you longing for the comfort of actual cards in your hand and actual friends at your side.

It was the goblin, in the green room, with the sword.

Although the Dungeon Twister board game is available in multiple languages (including English) and has enjoyed success throughout the world since its original French release in 2004, there's a good chance that you aren't familiar with this complex dungeon-based strategy game. Fortunately, the PlayStation Network edition includes a comprehensive tutorial spread over the course of 20 introductory missions. Less fortunately, that education takes entirely too long. The game presents its various rules in a generally accessible manner that makes a bunch of different rules come together effectively. There's really no way you'll reach the end of the tutorial missions without an intimate knowledge of how everything works.

Yet some of the lessons could easily have been condensed, and a number of the missions don't teach you anything new--they just have you defeating a capable rival using skills mastered in lessons up to that point, and you have to win before you can continue learning how things work. Most new missions really do introduce an important new element and force you to use new knowledge, but your artificial nemesis is dull, and the amount of time that you must invest before the game finally concedes that you know all you need to know is demoralizing.

The path of the goblin is a crooked one, surrounded by walls.

The Dungeon Twister board shows a collection of rooms populated with monsters and heroes and items, and each player receives cards that determine basic things like who gets to advance how many spaces in a given turn. The overall goal is to score a certain number of victory points, which are attained by guiding your characters across a dungeon, by eliminating enough of your opponent's pieces, or by working out some effective combination of the two actions.

A variety of factors make the rush for victory points an interesting endeavor, including doors that must be broken or opened by certain character classes, and treasure chests that you can carry across the goal line for a nice bonus. There are also armor and weapons that add to your stats so that you're more likely to survive against a powerful foe in direct combat; plus, you can find potions to extend your turn and rope that can form makeshift bridges over floor traps that would normally slow certain warriors.