Dauntless Review

In many video games, there is an oscillating pattern between fighting monsters for money and using that money to get new weapons to fight stronger monsters. But back in the early 2000s, Monster Hunter was released and posed a different idea: What if instead of buying stronger weapons, players crafted new weapons out of the flesh and bones of the monsters they had killed? Since the release of the first Monster Hunter game, the series has grown in popularity. And since there’s nothing studio executives like more than taking an existing popular game and making a free-to-play clone of it, let me tell you about Dauntless.

In Dauntless, players take the role of a Slayer, a mercenary who combats creatures known as Behemoths that threaten the human city of Ramsgate. They’re behemoth slayers, not monster hunters, it’s different ok? As players kill behemoths, they will be rewarded with parts of the behemoth’s body that can be used to create new weapons and armor with the natural powers of the behemoth infused into them. After building the newer, cooler gear from the most recent behemoth, players are sent to kill the next behemoth on the list. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In spite of all the joke I make at Dauntless’s blatant idea theft, I actually think it makes some huge improvements over the Monster Hunter model. The most important example of this is the lack of grind. In the Monster Hunter games, players are forced to gather a slew of items and resources beyond monster body parts to craft support items such as potions and tools, sometimes having to use up precious inventory space to bring along resource gathering tools to gather these items. Beyond that, some monster body parts have a 1% chance of being obtained, meaning players have to fight against certain monsters repeatedly just to get one item to make their new weapon or armor. I once had to fight a very angry lightning ape 30 times in Monster Hunter before I got the one item I needed to forge the cool lightning sword that I wanted. This isn’t to say that Dauntless has no grind, but it is significantly friendlier. While healing potions are free, any sort of ability-modifying potions are created with resources that must be gathered on a hunt. However, players don’t need to bring along any special tool to gather these resources and are only limited by how many they can find rather than a maximum inventory size. Players are also required to gather specific body parts from behemoths to make armor and weapons, but making these weapons and armor only require commonly acquired body parts and most of upgrades don’t need behemoth parts at all, instead players only need to have orbs that can be gathered from hunting any behemoth of the same elemental alignment as the weapon or armor. Possibly the least impactful but still appreciate effort to relieve the grind, all armor sets in Dauntless have four parts to them, being head, chest, arm and leg armor, compared to Monster Hunter having five parts to an armor set with the addition of waist armor. This is only meaningful for players coming from Monster Hunter to Dauntless, and in some ways can limit customization, but I personally appreciate it.

Reducing the gameplay grind is a big help in attracting and retaining players, but it’s far from the only good feature of Dauntless. A second improvement on the Monster Hunter model is customization. Creating a player character in Dauntless has a huge variety of appearance options, including two different categories of makeup and as many facial features sliders as Skyrim. Additionally, all armor can have its color changed, both primary color and accent color, with a tertiary color option listed on the future goals of the game’s website. Players are also able to change their appearance at any time in the main city. Beyond aesthetic customization, Dauntless introduces a category of equipment called Lanterns. Each different lantern has two different activated abilities independent of your other equipment, giving players the ability to make a play style to match their preferences. Another point of excellence is the explanation of the additional skills players can equip. Each piece of armor has one level in a skill that can help players and more levels can be added in by equipping items called Cells. The abilities themselves are nothing extraordinary, but Dauntless uses very clear language to explain what each level of the skill gives the player. Compare this to Monster Hunter that often uses vague phrases like “greatly increased chance” or “increased damage.”

I’m saying a lot of good things about Dauntless so I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I was about to recommend this game, but hold your horses because this game’s monetization scheme is just gross. As soon as a player logs in, a window is shoved in front of their faces promoting the game’s Elite Hunt Pass. This costs about $10 US and expires at the end of every season, which looks to be about six weeks. All players are given a basic hunt pass for free but all of the good rewards are in the elite version. Beyond that, one of the two vendors players see upon getting to the main town is the vendor who sells goods that cost the game’s paid currency, platinum. 1000 platinum is $10 US. So immediately players are confronted with the prompt to spend money in this free game. Worse still, each of the equipment vendors also has a menu to access the paid currency options, so players can’t just ignore the guy in the front lobby and be safe. Players are also encouraged to spend money to enable more cell crafting slots at the game’s cells vendor and spend even more money to speed up the crafting process. But possibly worst of all, at the end of each mission players are given a breakdown of every item they acquired on during the hunt, but a large section is left blank with a message that points out that they could have earned more rewards if they had just sprung for the elite hunt pass. These tactics are awful by themselves, but the fact that they are shoved to the front in an otherwise excellent game makes me so much more upset. I would have been happy spending money as a one-time purchase to get everything in this game and bypass all this terrible nonsense.

The pay structure isn’t the end of Dauntless’s flaws though. The ability modifier cells, for some reason, are gained out of cores, which are just loot boxes. You’ll get two to four of them in each core, with the contents being randomized. It’s ridiculous that you have to adjust your abilities around the contents of a randomly decided box you get by leveling up. The one saving grace of this system is there’s no way to buy these with money, cutting off a very predatory path. There are also significant bugs with the game, such as queuing up for a mission and being stuck searching for a server for ten minutes, then the queue gives up without telling players it has stopped searching. There are also moments where the game will wrongly believe you’ve gone somewhere you’re not supposed to and fade the screen to black, putting your character at the starting area of the map again. These things don’t happen very often, but even once is enough to sour a player’s opinion of the game.

Dauntless is like an excellent meal wrapped up in wet tissue. Yes you can get the tissue off, but getting around it is a huge pain and it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I firmly believe that you and a group of friends can get together on a voice chat and have a great time killing behemoths in this free game, but the second you pay any money for Dauntless you’ve messed up by rewarding these awful tactics.

Don’t buy this game

I hate to say it, but there’s nothing here worth spending your money on