Overall, Dauntless is a ton of fun and a great game to play alone or with friends. It occupies realm of easy to pick-up hard to master perfectly and offers a ridiculous amount of gameplay for free. There are seven different weapons which you can freely switch between, and all of them offer a unique playstyle and abilities to master. Dauntless is the perfect game to run around with your friends in or to play by yourself focusing on your goals.
What Dauntless lacks in layered complexity it makes up for with tightly crafted combat and rewarding progression, proving you don’t need to cram every possible feature into a game for it to be great.
Anyone who can not make friends with a rather broad-based, but then always repetitive content and attaches importance to a story or multi-layered characters, is wrong with Dauntless.
Dauntless is a great foundation for a rollicking monster-mashing time, but without the critical component of a compelling endgame, your journey has no satisfying destination. Only time will tell if the swirling islands around Ramsgate can provide something more.
I wanted very badly to love Dauntless, and for a time I think I did thanks to the fantastic combat and weapon variety. But the lack of any real storytelling makes the repetitive questing structure a glaring issue in desperate need of some TLC. If you’re looking for a new go-to F2P experience, you could do much worse — just don’t expect a world drenched teeming with lore and compelling characters.
All in all, Dauntless is a good free-to-play experience that has the potential to become great. Its playful art style, streamlined combat, and rich progression system can provide hours of entertainment, and the fact that it features cross-platform multiplayer is a major triumph all by itself.
A game with unapologetically singular focus, its distillation of deeper MMOs' elements nevertheless results in an experience that all too often feels barren.