In my preview for Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, I wondered whether the fun mix of building and battling could last through the entire dungeon, or if this was bound to become a boring and repetitive grind. The simple answer is "a bit of both", but fortunately the good outweighs the bad to the depths of the dungeon and the discoverable secrets add a nice bit of spice to keep things interesting all the way through.

You play as an apprentice Dungeon Maker who has come to town looking to hone your skills and build a dungeon in the hopes of eventually trapping the horrible 'Wandering Demon' that has been menacing the region. But you are not the first - throughout history many novices have tried to create the ultimate dungeon, but all have failed. The back story to why you need to build a dungeon to accomplish this goal is presented simply and in a way that makes sense as an impetus to get you into the game; monsters threaten humanity in the region, so the desire for all dungeon makers is to lure those monsters away from people and into dungeons, where they can hunt them down and kill them off. Of course, this is where it all gets interesting - some monsters like certain environments while others appear only in certain sized rooms or when your level reaches a certain 'score', or at certain levels of the dungeon.

Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground is essentially two games in one then - an action-RPG and a dungeon creator. Of course, the overall success depends on how each component works, as well as how the combined effect blends to create a compelling gaming experience. Because this is a 'dungeon crawler', you aren't carried along by pervasive story elements or romantic threads or side quests involving escorting civilians to safety - it's all about buildin' the dungeons and killin' the beasties!

The technical elements - graphics, sound, controls, and load times - are not all that interesting to describe. That's not because they are particularly bad or good, but because they keep out of the way enough to let you get dragged in a very natural way into the gameplay. Okay, so that vague and nonsensical statement pretty much forces me to describe each of them and then tell you why the sentence actually does make sense!

I have refined my load-time ranting to focus on the way in which load times in PSP games impact the way you play. For example, in Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony, I would regularly avoid using portals because of the agonizingly (pun intended) long load times associated with portal travel. So something that had been integral to the way I played the PC game was largely removed from the PSP game. The reason this is important to Dungeon Maker is that there are many opportunities for load times to ruin the game; since you design every part of every dungeon level, you already know that the game needs to load every level and write back any changes, as well as loading specific assets from the game disc. As I built up the complexity of my levels, I expected load times to potentially become an issue - but they never did. All loads, whether between town and dungeon or between dungeon levels, are quick and do not impede you making any choices. Similarly, there is little to no apparent overhead to adding elements to a dungeon - you simply place it and move along. This is simple and fun and gives you incentive to continue, as well as being a great achievement by the developers, considering the proliferation of PSP games with very long load times.

The sound and controls are similarly unobtrusive. There's a decent soundtrack that provides a nice background without being either annoying or compelling (well, given how much you will listen to it, the battle music does get annoying after a while, but the rest is fine), and the amount of voiced dialog is fairly impressive - and well done. The sounds of battle are similarly well done, but again are neither annoying nor compelling. The controls look terribly complex on paper, yet are completely intuitive. This is because there are small labels to help you through every situation - this is one of those little things that you can read and say 'sounds good', but you won't really understand the impact until you understand that there are dozens of menu possibilities that are context-sensitive, based upon whether you are building or exploring, making new areas or changing existing ones, or even removing stuff you have already built!

So what about the graphics? They are very nice. Oh, I can hear the PSP graphics fanboys hooting now! Calling the graphics 'nice' is truly damning with faint praise on a system rooted in handheld graphics superiority. But again, it is not criticism - is truly is praise. You can see the details of how you decorate each room and hall in every level and know without question which materials have been used. Similarly the characters in town all have personalities that shine through their graphical representations as well, while the town as a while looks great. Dungeon Maker doesn't have the intense graphics of some of the PSP racers like Test Drive Unlimited and Wipeout Pure, nor the high dynamic range lighting of Death Jr. II, nor even the bloom and lighting effects of the Legend of Heroes series, but it still manages to produce some nice visuals. If anything, not having the best graphics serves the highest possible purpose - keeping you playing the game as much as possible. In a game of this sort I will always trade off better graphics for shorter load times.

So, that covers all of the technical items, and hopefully it now makes more sense why I say it is a good thing that they all just stay out of the way. They allow you to focus on the important stuff - building dungeons and vanquishing monsters. And since those are the two real reasons to play the game, and are very different in how they are carried out, I'll look at each one individually.

The third element - time spent in the town - is where you gain quests, trade and engage in other important interactions. The town uses an 'overworld' map style and you just move from location to location with the cursor. Each location is important at one point or another and there are few enough that they are all worth checking out on every visit back to town - just to make sure you don't miss anything. Trading for items uses a very nice interface with plenty of information provided and a simple 'item for cash' system is perfectly suited for the PSP. As I mentioned in the preview, there aren't really dialog options - people either ask or tell you things and you go from there. That doesn't mean they are insipid ciphers though - far from it. Indeed, the varied personalities of the people you meet in the town and the way they slowly build up trust in you and hope for your dungeon are major factors in keeping the game interesting. Quite often the townspeople want an item, and when you find one in the dungeon and bring it to them they reward you - and usually the reward is disproportionate with the item. These often include critical and very rare items, such as rooms to trap key monsters and stairs to advance to the next level of the dungeon. One of my concerns was whether or not you would become so rich later in the game that these quests would become meaningless - fortunately that doesn't happen; from start to finish you are working to build your supplies and resources. For example, stairs are a complete necessity to progress and extremely hard to get. They require you to focus on building quality levels and frequently speaking to everyone around town to get a quest that rewards you with the stairs you need. This is another great way to keep you engaged!

Dungeon building and combat both utilize the same basic 'dungeon interface' but with important distinctions. The dungeon interface is at once simple and deep. Basic exploration is quite simple - you move around using the analog stick or directional buttons and attack or use items by pressing one of the shape buttons. When you approach an undeveloped area of the dungeon, the buttons switch to dungeon-maker mode so that you can simply add elements on the fly. Beyond that, the large menu I mentioned while discussing controls provides access to everything - your inventory and equipped items, magic and potions and also the ability change architectural elements such as adding new appearances to areas or erasing places you did a lousy job of designing.

Building dungeon levels is another of those deceptively simple tasks - you outfit yourself with plenty of hallways, turns, room types and structural change elements and then place them in unused areas or apply new styles to bare areas. This is not a simple thing where you make pretty designs and move to the next level though - each level has a score that affects the monsters that visit it, the loot you can obtain and the possibilities of the subsequent levels. Monsters tend to like complex mazes, with plenty of twists and turns to surprise unsuspecting adventurers (that would be you). Certain monsters favor large storerooms and others more cramped quarters. Each monster type has a certain architecture they favor - from bare dirt to stone to wood to ornate marble and more, and there are plenty of subtle variations to exploit to design the best possible level. And if you get far into building a level and realize that you have done a poor job then you just choose to remove elements - or even clear the entire floor - and poof! - all of the elements are back in your inventory.

The combat system is an interesting on that's both familiar and different - the actual combat will be familiar to anyone who has played an action RPG on their PSP but the motivations are entirely different. To defeat enemies you can use special ranged attacks or standard hack 'n' slash tactics. Combat takes place in real-time and enemies attack you once you wander within their range. All of the attacks are mapped to the triangle, circle or X button, with the square button calling up the menu to unleash other attacks, use items or change which attacks are mapped to which buttons. You don't get experience from killing enemies - except for the occasional recognition rewards from the town, so it would be more precise to say that you do not get direct experience rewards from killing enemies. Yet you will run around killing them all because you either need them to drop something for a quest you are pursuing, or you need whatever loot or gold they might be holding. Or you just want to make sure that the dungeon is clear so you can continue building and expanding the level.

As you progress, the monsters get tougher and some do much more damage than others, but there are none that you can't take down with some small effort. When you hit a 'challenge bump' - suddenly getting a new type of tough monster to deal with - you will likely die once or twice. The game lacks any sort of 'you are about to die' warning flash or other system that most action RPGs feature, but fortunately the 'death penalty' - the consequences for dying - are pretty light. You wake up outside the dungeon, but all of the work you did and items you collected are intact. You cannot return to the dungeon that day, but instead need to rest up and trade then prepare to do battle again the next day. This ends up being an annoyance more than anything - you will die thinking "if I'd realized that I was about to die I would have stepped back and used a health item", but since you can just return the next day it isn't a major issue. Of course, the dungeon will be restocked with monsters to battle once again. However, the challenge is never so great that you will fall into a 'die and retry' loop, and since your dungeon has an elevator that takes you to whatever level you choose, you're Etrian Odyssey style trek from the start of the dungeon to the point where you fell.

The fundamental problem with the game is that while the impetus to build, explore, rebuild, visit the town and slay monsters keeps you enthralled for perhaps a dozen hours or so, the 'Lite' nature of both the dungeon building and combat wears off over time. This is a real problem in a dungeon crawler, where you depend on the addictive nature of combat and minor twists and turns to keep you going. In Dungeon Maker you are doing the same basic thing for twenty levels and hoping to find some of the hidden bonus dungeons along the way. The quality balance between the three aspects - town, building and combat - is clear; building dungeons is best, spending time in town is also satisfying, but the combat is what drags the game down. It is incredibly repetitive and feels like level grinding from the very start. Perhaps an additional reward - some other experience point alternative - would have helped drive you to keep at the game for hour after hour as with other dungeon crawlers released this year (like Izuna, Etrian Odyssey and Puzzle Quest). In those games the addictive nature never seems to let go of you - it's tough to shut the system off before you fall asleep playing and you can't seem to take the cartridge or disc out of the system. With Dungeon Maker, once you've played for tne to fifteen hours, you will find it pretty easy to put it aside for a couple of days to play something else.

But you will return - the dungeon building is fun and will bring you back, which is a credit to the quality of the gameplay. I hope that if the developers decide to make a sequel, they can focus on the combat - now that would make for an incredibly addictive experience! Until then however, Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground is a solid game with a number of innovative features that is fresh and fun, even if it ultimately falls a little short of the mark. This is the sort of game that PSP owners should buy to support the efforts of developers trying new things and making something other than just another generic hack 'n' slash or Final Fantasy clone, and even if you take breaks in between your playing sessions, you'll still keep on coming back for more.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).