Credit to indie developers who keep trying to come up with new styles of play by what sometimes feels like throwing multiple genres and play styles into a blender and letting it rip. DunHero is absolutely one such game, somehow feeling like a mix of RPG and classic adventure concepts with twin-stick controls and combat that honestly feels more like a shooting game at times. Considering pretty well all of the above is fine by me, I was game to dig in. Unfortunately, when it comes to the big picture of polish and execution though, this feels a few patches away from something decent.

To the game’s credit, it absolutely does a good job of keeping you on your toes, though that doesn’t always feel fair or very fun. You’ll pretty well jump straight into the action, roaming the relatively small zones in search of loot, while needing to deal with a pretty unpredictable and sometimes outright overwhelming number of enemies. There’s a bit of a learning curve here, trying to grasp what you need to be careful of to avoid the townsfolk attacking you as well, but after a few runs you’ll get the idea, and even find opportunities to essentially draw them into conflicts with monsters or bandits to sort of act as help. Did I mention that it can be pretty chaotic? The good news is that you can at least sometimes use that to your advantage.

The problem that pretty quickly becomes apparent is unfortunately what you could call a lack of polish if you were polite, but what really borders on feeling like incomplete game design. You can tell that the developers threw a whole bunch of idea balloons in the air, but quite a lot of it ranges from sloppy to outright irritating. The controls and interfaces are funky, you’re often inundated with information but given insufficient direction on how to make proper use of different equipment, and in general the opportunities to get healed feel cripplingly scarce. Then there’s simply the uneven nature of the challenge, with the typical boss fight feeling more manageable than entering a new area and immediately being ambushed by a number of enemies. The thing is, you could possibly dig that fact, and relish the challenge of it all, but on the whole it feels like it needs more time and attention to reach its true potential.