Phoenix Labs’s upcoming free to play RPG Dauntless has turned heads since its announcement at The Game Awards in December of 2016. Slated to release in 2018, the premise of the game revolves around hunting giant beasts called Behemoths and using their skins and claws to create your own weapons. In my time with the game so far, I’ve found it to be both enjoyable and grind-inducing, if not complete with some glaring flaws. However, it is important to note that I am playing a beta early access version of the game, not the final version.
Dauntless is very similar to other hack-and-slash RPGs, with several different weapon types and a moveset unique to each one. However, each moveset has no more than five combos at most and I found some of them to be repetitive after a short time. However, one I found to be very fun to use were the Chainblades, which is perfect for an person preferring an agile and speedy approach. But it is important to mention that the other weapons behave very differently from each other and cater to different play types, so I’m not completely discrediting them.
Battles with the Behemoths are fine enough, but are noticeably easier when playing with three other people online through matchmaking. Load in by yourself, and you’ll be facing a Behemoth that is not scaled down in health or damage, meaning that you by yourself face the same beast that it can take four people to bring down. Some may point out that this offers a great challenge, but a majority of the “difficulty” you face lies in the sometimes clunky combat system and unfair combos Behemoths can force you into. By this I mean that they will knock you down with an attack, and attack you again the second you get back up, a process that can go on and on until your death. And therein lies yet another flaw of the system, the extremely punishing and unfair death system. When playing with other people, if your health falls to 0, they can revive you and you can get back up to continue fighting. If you all fall, then the hunt is over. But if your health falls to 0 when soloing a Behemoth, that’s it, the hunt is over. No second chances, no chance to revive yourself or spawn again. Even if you play almost flawlessly, never taking hits from the speedy Behemoths, it is also very possible to lose simply by running out of time before you can kill the Behemoth. The health points on that Gnasher that you and your three fellow Slayers found so easy to whittle down to 0 earlier suddenly become a looming and insurmountable obstacle once you try to fight it by yourself. It is true that this system encourages team play, but it also in turn beats down and makes almost impossible a solo play style, which is simply unacceptable in an RPG that requires grinding. This is because the rare material you need to earn from a Behemoth by killing it repeatedly may not be the same one others are seeking, and it thus becomes difficult to form a group with others. To me, these are some of the main weaknesses of the game, and ones I find quite difficult to justify.
I went into this game expecting a Monster Hunter style experience, a long-loved game series of mine that has a very similar premise to Dauntless, the starkest difference being in their art styles. I believe this game delivers an experience that is almost identical to Monster Hunter, but I am completely fine with that. I was never looking for anything other than that, and it is also important to note that Dauntless is free to play, whereas Monster Hunter is not. Dauntless can be just as successful as Monster Hunter simply due to its accessibility, and that’s something I’m glad I was able to experience in my time with the game.
