Dungeon Lords Previews

A whole fistful of hands-on previews for Heuristic Park's Dungeon Lords have made their way to the web. The first is at Gameplanet:
Dungeon Lords will be loaded with quests, personal missions, extensive skills and special abilities for customising your own character hero from a variety of races and multiple class specialisations. The game world will include ancient castles, dark forests, and dungeon lairs and heaps of NPC characters to interact with. It's been a while since we have seen a game from Bradley but by the way it is looking it has been worth the wait.

The second is at Gaming Nexus:
Melee combat is a simple matter of equipping one or two of the myriad weapons available, and left-clicking on the enemy. Different weapons have various fighting patterns, and multiple clicks will bring about fighting combos. I'm not sure if these combos are anything more than aesthetic, but they look quite nice. In addition to hacking away, a shield can be brought to bear with a simple right-click, so many fights are circling dances of dodge, block, and strike. While not incredibly deep, the complexity is a step up from most games in the genre.

The third is at Game Chronicles:
Your character begins the game with fairly modest skills and stats based on which race and class you choose, but you can customize that a bit even right at startup. There are six races to choose from, humans (male or female), elves (male or female), dwarves, urgoths, and wylvan. The first three are about what you would expect, while the urgoths reminded me of an "orc" from other games, a big hulking brute, and the wylvan is a feline race with high stats in dexterity and agility. Your choice of class is one of fighter, rogue, mage, or adept. Your race and your class determine what you're able to do at the start of the game and also make it cheaper for you to choose skills that fit that class, but you are not barred from any skill that would fall under the other classes, you can do everything if you spend enough of your experience points on it.

And the fourth is at Game Vortex:
Dungeon Lords uses real-time combat instead of the role-playing tradition of turn-based. This means that you don't have time to sit and ponder your next attack. You have to hit your enemies fast and hard if you are going to survive. Though the game uses a 3rd-person perspective, the controls scheme is based off of the 1st-person PC layout. You move your character with the W, S, A, and D buttons and aim/look with the mouse. This scheme lends itself well to the game's setup and makes it easy to just jump in and start playing the game.