After about 65 hours into Dungeon Defenders II I am happy to report that they have been enjoyable. While the overall feel of DDII remains similar to that of its predecessor, there are some things that are notably different. To start with, if you want to use each of the heroes you will have to grind them up to the higest level (currently 25 although this is bound to increase as new content becomes available) individually as the maps are now broken up into level restrictive increments such as 1-3, 3-5, 5-10 etc. You are however able to use your higher level characters in lower level maps although they will be scaled down accordingly to the highest level for the current map. This can be time consuming but presumably it is to discourage solo play and encourage teamwork and synergy between community members.

The maps feel a bit busier graphically and it was harder for me to wrap my head around tower placement than it was for the first game. In DD1, you were often able to place towers in such a way that you could guard multiple lanes with clever and well thought out placement. With DD2 placement feels more dictated and formulaic which takes a bit of fun away from the planning process.

Currently at the time of this review (Dec. 2013) only one "Stage" is available. There is not yet a "boss" fight which was disappointing but the game is still in a pre-alpha state. There are synergies now between damage types and trap combinations which are interesting and give the players something to strive for in terms of teamwork.

Item progression seems well planned, however the items have very little variation. There are generally two stats associated to one item, the first is determined by the item name (i.e.: "Rapid Fire Gloves" are guaranteed to have Defense Speed on them) and the second appears to be random. As a result of only 2 stats for each item, you are almost forced into choosing a specialization of 2 to be effective and are only looking for items with those 2 stats on them for the majority of the game. This often leads to finishing a map, browsing through items very quickly, keeping the ones that match your criteria and selling the rest. While this seems like a good formula, I found myself quickly bored as there are only a couple combinations of items that are worthwhile at the moment (Defense Power/Defense Speed for builders, and Hero Damage/Ability Power for DPS). This meant that 90% of the items I found I sold and 10% I kept. With 20-30 items per map it felt like a lot of time selling useless items.

The inventory system is currently somewhat challenging to navigate. Dragging items onto other bags works infrequently and forces you to manually open bags and move items between open slots. It was difficult to organize them and I wanted a more user friendly experience. It would also be lovely to be able to check your inventory with 'i' like in the first game instead of being forced to visit a defender's forge.

Working with other people was sometimes more challenging than it should have been. I think this game could benefit from a built in chat system to make the process easier.

I'm looking forward to the costumes to become available in game via micro transactions so that I can lend some uniqueness to my character as currently, when there are four monks running around in game it feels very much like a clone of the person next to me which takes away from the immersion considerably.

Overall, the game was really fun up to the maximum level but there is little reason to stay and grind at the moment. I look forward to exploring additional content as it becomes available. I would reccommend purchasing the game in it's current stage to anyone who is willing to be patient as content becomes available since as of right now it is somewhat limited in scope.