Dungeon Hero - first impressions

"Goblins have a religion based on trees, and each city suburb is based on these," explains level designer Andrew Parsons. "In Birch, a religious area, you'll see shamans gathering together, other guys preaching to groups of goblins. In direct contrast, meanwhile, you've got The Greys, our slum area, where there's a crack in the cavern roof above it, which means that it's constantly raining. It's the place where the dead, the dying, the diseased, the criminal and the poor can be found. What we're going for there is a Blade Runner-type feel."

This city, then, will be the hub of your adventures, changing with the ebbs and flows of the story - should a plague break out, for example, you'll start to see white handprints on doors, green ooze dripping off walls and goblin doctors scurrying from place to place. All around you, Firefly wants the city to buzz with activity - the industrial Oak area, for example, being the gateway to the frontline trenches of the war against the Redeye clan, and as such heaving with weapon-smiths, field-hospitals and the walking wounded.

But what of the hack and the slash? That's getting a revamp from the dungeon masters too - with a studied attempt to remove the button-mashing ethos so entrenched within the genre. There'll be melee and ranged attacks, obviously, but with up to 50 critters swarming around you, the emphasis is on close combat. A right-click will have you block jabs from the more unfriendly people you meet, with the enemy at such proximity you'll have to make yourself space to swing your sword through shield-bashes and headbutts before timing your slashes and flurries to the amount of space you grant yourself. It won't all be depressingly console-like combo moves either, with you swapping around different modes of violence role-play fashion - and very much developing a fighting style of your own.

Dungeon Hero is still miles off but (in a similar fashion to the lofty ambitions of Hellgate: London), it's certainly striking in its sheer desire to recreate a tried-and-tested formula in a novel and engaging way. As someone who's shown lethargic and terminally dull Diablo-clones on what approaches a bi-weekly basis, it's a breath of refreshingly dank and musty dungeon air in a genre that's been bereft of originality for an extremely long time.