Dungeon Defenders: Awakened
Rating Summary
Based on 12 critic reviews
OpenCritic Rating
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Top Critic
For the full breakdown and verdict on Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, check out our video review above. For more video reviews, subscribe to Shacknews on YouTube. Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is available on Steam as of May 28, 2020.
Top Critic
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is a fun time, especially with others. But it doesn't have as much content as the game it's remaking yet, meaning that people still playing that one might be reluctant to move onto this version.
Top Critic
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is a delightful remaster of the original Dungeon Defenders that shows great promise, but currently the features that would make it a complete game.
Top Critic
Dungeon Defenders: Awakening makes for a fun title to play with friends or people online.
Top Critic
As someone who's enjoyed the previous couple of Dungeon Defenders games a lot, I must say that Awakened is quite a disappointing experience. Although it retains the familiar formula and includes cool modes, it's still an undeniably clunky iteration of the franchise.
I enjoyed playing the Nintendo Switch port for DDA. Outside the issues with scaling while playing handheld, the experience was virtually identical to my experience with the PC version last year. Even though I only played offline, I can certainly see DDA being a great party game for Discord communities and game nights, given its easy learning curve and fast-paced playstyle. The variety of hero combinations and playstyles, several game modes, and different game difficulties allow endless hours of replayability, a great moniker for a Nintendo Switch game. If you can get past the minor accessibility issues, you may find yourself fighting wave after wave and hour and hour in Dungeon Defenders: Awakened.
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened lacks a final polish to make it a truly great experience. The menu system is cumbersome, the solo experience gets repetitive due to lack of variety, the story is thin and there isn’t a lot that makes this entry stand out from previous games in the series.
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is an accumulation of the feedback and skills that this developer has received throughout the series. The gameloop of stopping hordes of enemies in their tracks just works, but if you’re a fan of the series, then you’ll be getting more of the same with this entry.
So overall, Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is a good return for the series. It’s fun to play both with friends and family though it will be interesting to see where things go from here. With the original success of the first, the troubles of the second, and then technically the original revamp of the first, Awakened has the opportunity to expand with the knowledge of the titles that came before it while also avoiding the issues that came along for the ride. I just hope that I get my Barbarian back...
Ultimately, the success of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened can’t be fully determined at this point in time, and there’s a feeling that the console releases may be where the game gets an opportunity to shine, away from the ready comparisons to its predecessors.
