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Anyone who has played online role-playing games will surely have thought of one or the other time: "If only these idiots were not in my group, then we would have beaten the boss a long time ago"
So how about playing the whole group yourself and putting it to the test?
You can do that with The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians. The 2015 game by Mana Games is not a MMORPG but a dungeon crawler, but focuses on a combat system, which works pretty much like in a MMORPG, except that you play all the roles yourself: The tank on it is designed to take or avoid damage and accordingly tries to attract the opponent and to hold the "aggro" as it is called in MMO jargon; the healer who tries to keep the damage dealers and especially the tank alive by using healing magic and the Damage Dealers, who in turn have to inflict as much damage as possible on their opponents, so that the boss dies before the mana goes out or any other calamity happens, such as someone pulling the Aggro due to unfortunate timing so that the tank cant get it back, which then leads to the attack of the boss on other characters and thus possibly their death.
Of course, since playing it in real time would be a bit brutal, the fight can be paused at any time to better coordinate the actions of the characters.
But before I explain the fight in more detail, back to the main screen, where we also see the version number on the bottom left.
As mentioned, the game was released in 2015, and when you see that the game is running version 1.0j, you might think that there were just a few small marginal patches with bug fixes and Co that lead to the "j".
However, this is not entirely correct, as you will see, if you look at the news on the game on Steam, and look at the other in the forum, in which the patch notes of each new version are listed. In fact, the J came about through larger patches, in which, for example, a minimap was also introduced, while smaller bug fixes are only reflected in the rising build number.
I would like to emphasize this so clearly, because the developer was by no means idle in the over two years, and has expanded the game several times, and repeatedly makes small bugfixes and balancing changes with lightning fast mini-patches.
Among other things, I had reported that a boss is not working as he should, which was rectified directly within 24 hours. On another occasion, I had noted that a boss fight was a bit easy, as the damage of a spell could be ignored. Again, the developer released a patch within 24 hours and increased the damage.
The game has already made many minor and major changes and there are sure to be a few more to follow. However, the validity of my review is likely to persist beyond future changes, as praise and criticism primarily affects rudimentary game elements that are unlikely to be significantly changed.

And first, let's take a closer look at character creation:

While the game begins with a kind of playable intro, where we are introduced as a new Guardian for an Underground Dungeon, and can also provide information there for our own character, we can revise this information soon afterwards, if we would like. We are received down in the dungeon, taken to our barracks, where we then oversleep the breakout of all prisoners, which we then must capture with the group we put together at that point.
Here we get back to the role distrinction, which in MMOs is often referred as Holy Trinity. The game features one group slot for a tank, one for a healer, and two for damage Dealers. Theoretically, we can also fill the spots with non-matching characters, which, however, as in most MMOs, is likely to fail.
The characters can now be put together by first selecting one of the 5 races with very easy attributes pros and cons, and then one of the 4 classes, which in turn each contain 3 talent trees. And only these talent trees then define what role the character will play in the group. It's a bit like World of Warcraft, where a warrior can be played as a tank or damage dealer, but a magician is limited to the role of the damage dealer. I'll go into more detail on the individual talent trees at a later point.
We can also select a picture and a voice, which is only used for screaming in case of damage, and finally we will put the created characters into the group and adjust which character we ourselves are, which is only relevant for dialogue order.
If every slot is occupied we begin the game.

As is usual in classical dungeon crawlers (for example in Dungeonmaster from 1987 or Legend of Grimrock from 2012), we move step by step through the dungeon. We also get into discussions within the group, which serve to explain the game mechanics, what in itself works relatively well, although the fight is somewhat deeper and more complicated than you could explain in this short form.

These recurring dialogues with their own group members, are the only dialogues in the game and also almost the only continuation of a kind of extremely superficial and unfortunately also miserable story. And both the story and the World Design are basically already my biggest criticisms of the game, and what I have absolutely missed in Grimrock already.
Although the dungeon looks pretty nice, like in Grimrock, it is still very sterile and does not have a real personality. We are absolutely alone in the dungeon with our group. There are no NPCs to talk to, and of course no traders and no gold, so you can throw away unneeded items. But there is nothing really "cool" to discover. When I think of Stonekeep, I also think of Wahooka, the singing fairies and the dragon. When I think of Eye of the Beholder, the nice acting Templars from the second part come to my mind first, or I remember the chained dwarf from the first part that you free and could invite to the group. When I think of Lands of Lore, I have images of the witch Scotia in my head who turns into a raven during an encounter in the game, I think of the elf we found dying at his house with an arrow in his body. All these are things that have kept you motivated in these games to keep playing to see what's next, how the story unfolds and what else to discover.

In this regard, The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians offers absolutely nothing. Similar to Grimrock, there are a few scrolls that you can find, and the previously mentioned dialogues, which only tell a completely linear mind-boggling story and do not contribute to the atmosphere at all. In addition, the German translation is also extremely infested with errors. But since the story and the dialogues do not contribute much to the game anyway, the quality of the translation is negligible.

Similar to Legend of Grimrock, The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians confines itself to puzzles in the dungeons as well as to combat.

Although you can theoretically play the majority of the game even without the solution of puzzles, in almost every level there is at least one optional segment with some kind of logic puzzle, where you must push floor tiles in the correct order, run over opening and closing trap doors, evade a series of fireballs and so on. For me these puzzles were always a welcoming change, but I would say the quality of the puzzles was a little better with Grimrock, as far as I can remember.
In addition to these puzzle segments, there is also a scavenger hunt, which was patched in after release and runs through the whole dungeon. It starts with finding a scroll that says you should put it on a bench. If you find the right bench, a door opens and you find the next scroll with the next clue, which goes on in many many steps. Partly very nice, but also a bit abstract, so that you will certainly look up one or the other step on the Internet in order to continue with it. Incidentally, the Automap is not available from the outset. In each level, a map must first be found, with which then reveals the already explored area. If you find the second map, which is usually better hidden, you will see the remaining secret passages on the map.

But if you do not need to solve the puzzles to move on, why are they there? Of course, The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians does not come without loot and the puzzles often reward you with quite useful stuff.

Another way to get better items is of course by combat, which is also the focus of the game. As mentioned at the beginning the combat runs in real time with pause, which in itself works very well. Basically I'm not a fan of this kind of fight, and I prefer pure turn based tactical combats, since in most games with RealTime with Pause, RTwP for short, you benefit massively by pounding the space bar several times per second to make small adjustments, which make big differences in the fight, but also make the game more fractured than it could ever be in turn-based combat, at least if you're playing the games on the highest difficulty and wanting to get the most out of each combat.
However, The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians does not have this problem for two main reasons: First, the group is permanently played from the first person perspective. Although you can move the group as a whole, which is also necessary in some fights, it makes no sense in others, because you can not simply step back as in Grimrock or Stonekeep in order to avoid an opponent's blow. However, there are is no positioning within the group which usually causes most of the problems in RTwP battles. The rogue has to run one more pixel, so you can stop again to give him the attack order, you have to reposition the tank, run away with healers and so on. And with the elimination of the positioning, the Aggro system is even more prominent. The tank is usually the only one that should collect the damage. It can happen every now and then that the tank is about to die and another character should take over the aggro for a short time, so that he gets hit once instead of the tank in order for the tank being rescued by the healer and can take over again. But the interplay of the Classes and the correct use of abilities, especially healing spells, are here, as well as in MMORPGs the most important aspect.
And how these abilities are used in the combat system are the other reason why the RTwP system works so well here, which in turn may be somewhat confusing to MMO players. Like many MMOs, all abilities have a cooldown where you can not use the ability again. This time is sometimes 2 seconds, sometimes 2 minutes. And MMO players will be familiar with the concept of a global cooldown, which requires at least one or two seconds between each skill, so you can not use 10 abilities within a second. Although this Global Cooldown is also available in The Fall of the Dungeon Guadians, it is 6 seconds, which is significantly higher than the casting time of many abilities. So what happens after a blow or spell that takes only 3 seconds? In the remaining 3 seconds the character will perform automatic attacks. These however can be initially "overwritten" by an ability.
So imagine that one of these automatic attacks lasts 2.5 seconds, combined with the 3-second ability that leaves 0.5 seconds in which the global cooldown is still active, so the next automatic attack will automatically start.
At the end of the 6 seconds, you can now use the next ability directly to replace the automatic attack. If you wait a bit however, so that the automatic attack is already in progress for a whole second, then it will not be possible to overwrite it anymore and the ability is queued after it's end.
That may sound a bit complicated, but it makes sure you do not get rushed. It also comes with the help that you can queue up several skills of the characters which are then automatically carried out at the first possible opportunity. And these sequences can even be saved so that you can get them by just one click, for example, at the beginning of the combat so that you do not have to manually re-click them each time.
Theoretically you could of course also optimize the system by timeing it in a way so that auto attacks are never overwritten. This would be extremely cumbersome to play, as it is not supported by the interface, and the damage gain would be low even in the ideal case, as the next ability is delayed, would have done more damage and maybe even built a combo point earlier.

Most battles against normal opponents are not very exciting, but you can also adjust how fast the time should pass in combat, and if you do not plan these battles against trash enemies, it's not a problem as the fallen characters automatically get up again after the fight. Visually the enemies are quite diverse and sometimes look quite cool, but in the end battles against Trash opponents get annoying quickly. Therefore, I would also recommend to choose to reduce the amount of opponents in the difficulty setting. Do not worry, the game will not be easier. Elite opponents and bosses are still in the game. But you will not have to fight your way through so many weak opponents. The xp points and the loot are adjusted accordingly, so you do not miss out on anything.

The aforementioned elite opponents are much more interesting. There you have to pay much more attention and a few unfortunate hits can quickly mean the end, if you do not plan your skills optimally. These elite opponents will also have some abilities that you have to watch out for. When you see that there are nails on the opponent's castbar, this means that he will not move with that ability and you can run out of range with the entire group.
However, opponent abilities can also be aborted, using your own instant abilities that are not affected by the Global Cooldown. In World of Warcraft, you may be familiar with the Rogue ability "Kick", or the Shaman's Wind Shear, that work the same way.

At the end of each level, a boss waits for the group and they are sometimes similar to bosses in online role-playing games. In addition to their standard attacks and the special attacks of the elite opponents, they also have other special mechanics.
For example, the Bone Dragon boss early in the game has some strong AOE Damage spells. However, they have a longer casting time in which you must then quickly run to another place where there is a temporary protection buff. Another boss will teleport away, summon opponents, and try to heal himself. So you have to either quickly eliminate the opponents or disregard them first and collect the blows to quickly come to the boss and stop the healing.
Some of the bosses are nicely designed, while others (slightly the minority) are rather primitive and do not differ much from the elite opponents.
However, it can be a bit tiring when you have to repeat the same routine over and over again in some fights for about 20 minutes, just like a raid boss doing an online role playing game.
In contrast to these you can save the game during the combat, which takes away a lot of the risk of such long combats, but which of course also, especially because of the chance not to be hit at all, also leaves the option to save-scum. Meaning: You get hit, you load, you get hit, you load, your opponent misses, you save.

The boss battles were not perfectly balanced in my playthrough and sometimes a bit simple, but just as the developer did not implement the minimap until after watching a Let's Play by another player, he also made some adjustments to the bosses after the feedback.

Overall, the combat system itself works surprisingly well and I would very much prefer this type of combat to most real-time battles of other dungeon crawlers. For example I aborted my Let's Play of "Anvil of Dawn" back then because the fight was just too stupid for me. The fight in Legend of Grimrock I found catastrophic, as it was more important to dance around the opponent as the clever use of skills.
Although the interface of The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians leaves hardly anything to be desired, and offers many opportunities to customize it, whether you want a damage meter, a digital cooldown, or an option to scale interface elements, and while you can see exactly what is happening by mouseovering on spellbars or damage values, it still has a weakness in terms of targeting enemies. It's not a big problem in most cases, and only targeting opponents in the second row is a bit fiddly, but especially if you have to fight multiple groups of opponents at the same time and you have to turn back and forth during the fight, then it becomes a mess. Luckily though, this is very rare and so on the whole I would call the combat system, which is also the main focus of the game, very well implemented.

Of course you start small there with only a few essential skills and spells, which then become more and more numerous in the course of the game, but remain manageable until the end. At the end of the game each character will have about 10 usable abilities, but not all of them will be used in each fight.
There is a level-up in the character level pretty much once per dungeon level. Incidentally, each character also receives the same amount of experience points and does not miss anything if he is just unconscious. Additionally the starting experience of your characters was staggered by 500 experience points, so that the characters level up one by one and you can deal with one character after another.

As mentioned, each class has 3 talent trees, which then also determine the exact role. You basically find what you expect within these talent trees. The one talent increases the healing power by X percent, the other gives a chance of triggering anything on every attack and so on. Although you can access the other two talent trees of the class, the benefits of it is usually extremely low. The basic talent, which determines the standard ability of the talent tree can not be subsequently learned from other roles, except if you completely re-skkill the characters which you can do several amount of times even though it's limited.
But because many talents rely on the base ability, or on the role of this tree, it is rather uninteresting for a ranger, for example, to learn skills that increase dagger attacks when he does not use daggers at all.
Also the selection of the talents within the selected talent tree is not very exciting. Often your decision is about what is still the most meaningful, instead of looking forward to something cool, since most of the talents are small, passive adjustments.
While other games have a character system in which you routinely increase the obvious, it's no better in The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians if you have a choice, but the choice is often misery.
That does not mean that the talent system is a disaster, but there is lots of wasted potential.

The situation is quite similar regarding the items. But before getting to that, let me explain how the loot system works. In The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, the loot is randomly generated depending on which classes are in the group. For example, if you have 2 cloth users in the group, a plate user and a leather user, you would find 50% cloth armor and 25% plate armor and leather armor respectively.
And the game does not skimp on loot, even on the contrary: in combination with another problem, there is even too much.
The attributes and character values that are increased by this loot, such as willpower, strength or critical chance, have very different valences for the different classes. So far that's nothing new: For example in other games a magician has more use of the intelligence attribute than a warrior. However, the value of these values is difficult to understand for the different classes. Willpower, for example, is also useful for a tank as it increases resistances and improves blocking. A druid may also do something with willpower, but he benefits much more from awareness.
Since the composition of the values on the items does not follow a fixed scheme, so that not every item increases a few main attributes and separate minor attributes, but the items cross-mix these values, it is extremely difficult to understand which items are best for the class. Should you take the new gloves, because they have 20 more haste, but 3 less agility? Without doing calculations every time, you will have to puzzle. This is not really super important to beat the game, probably not even at the highest difficulty level, but it still lowers the joy of finding new items, if even after a close look it is hard to tell if this item is actually better as the old one. And the problem gets worse just because you find so many items, about 20 per level, and you probably have to gues at about 10 of them whether or not they are better than the old items, which quickly gets annoying. If only one half of the items were found, you would not have to puzzle that often, and on the other hand, two items of the same type would differ more because of the level, so that the choice would be clearer.

Alright, that were the actual mechanics. By the way, the game is also largely free of errors, apart from the German translation, and if you find an error, it will be fixed by the developer within a very short time.
The graphics are nice as mentioned before, but the design looks a bit generic. The music also has its stronger moments, which are then leveled even by also having recognizable loops or variency in volumes.

All in all, I would call The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians a mediocre, slightly different dungeon crawler that focuses on a battle with online roleplaying-like mechanics, which it does well. Also in terms of the puzzle and design of the dungeon it makes a pretty good figure. But it has weaknesses in much of what is usually the motivators of such games: The progression of the characters, which affects both items and talents, and a world that does not necessarily come up with a deep story, but is at least embedded in one and in which there are a few things to discover besides riddles and loot. And while the combat system itself works, the battles may eventually become tiring, and I strongly recommend you to reduce the number of enemies at the beginning of the game to avoid aggravating this problem.
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is a better Legend of Grimrock for me because I like it mechanically better in every way, but in terms of story and world design it's far behind the likes of Might and Magic, Lands of Lore or even Ishar and Eye of the Beholder.
So I give a neutral rating for this game, where a playthrough can take around 50 hours. It's not a bad game, but with its weaknesses, I can only recommend it to players who love the pure crawler mechanics and the MMO battles.