I’m very impressed with how well the online has held up, and my only real complaint is how ranked matchmaking at least for me on PS5, is slower than on PC. I’ve been playing wired on PS5, and have only had maybe 1 out of 10 games where there were some shenanigans relating to teleporting or instability. Over the last week, a majority of my online matches have been perfect. DNF Duel rollback netcode and online experienceĭNF Duel’s online mode lets you play ranked matches with matchmaking, player matches where you can search for or create your own lobby, and view rankings. You can also view the glossary for an explanation on the lore and other in-game terminology. This includes your online replays for watching later, your profile with match history, gallery for using the currency you’ve earned to unlock art from Dungeon Fighter Online and DNF Duel, movies, music, and more. These are excellent, and I’d definitely recommend doing them if you want to properly learn a specific character. This includes various basic tutorials and explains the mechanics of DNF Duel, but the real star of this mode is the combo and challenge sections. The practice mode lets you train as you please or do the very good tutorial. The latter modes are just for chasing high scores and don’t do anything different compared to the same modes in other fighting games where you go up against the CPU a few times with the challenge increasing as you progress through the ranks.
The offline modes include free battle against the CPU, the aforementioned story mode, arcade mode, and a survival mode. That is easier to do here compared to many fighters I’ve played in recent years thanks to the visual spectacle. You could also not pay attention to any of this and just enjoy messing around in-game to view the gorgeous animations while playing with friends for fun of course. DNF Duel has a few new mechanics relating to guarding, recovering HP, and mana that aren’t present in many fighters that people likely play, but the tutorial does a great job at explaining these well with interactive examples. You can use simple inputs to execute special attacks, but are rewarded a bit for using technical inputs. What makes DNF Duel accessible but still deep, is in how the gauge management works. All these names were unfamiliar to me as well, but playing through the story mode for each character gave me a decent background for these characters. I started with Striker, Dragon Knight, and Trouble Shooter for their designs, but ended up enjoying playing as Launcher and Kunoichi quite a bit more after a few days. On paper, this might seem low for a fighter aiming for newcomers to fighting games, but the roster is actually varied and brilliant to learn so far. This review will cover the game modes, how approachable it is, and also whether it is worth investing into right now with its lower than expected asking price.ĭNF Duel includes 15 characters in its base roster, with Lost Warrior being locked initially. This review is based on my time with all the game modes and also playing the online over the last week with friends and randoms across the world. Online servers weren’t live until launch day, which is why I didn’t have a review last week. In a lot of ways, DNF Duel feels like it nailed what Granblue Fantasy Versus did better, but has a few of its own problems that I will get to.For my DNF Duel PS5 review, I wanted to cover the game, how it looks and plays on both PS5 and PS4, the online experience, and more. DNF Duel is based on Dungeon Fighter Online, but it does a great job at introducing the characters to you while also being very accessible to newcomers to fighting games.
I’ve been playing it on PC and then on PS5 for review with no prior Dungeon Fighter Online experience. Having followed DNF Duel from Eighting, Arc System Works, and Nexon over the last few months, I have been very impressed with how it turned out over the last two weeks.