Dungeon Fighter Online is the type of game that evokes feelings of nostalgia from the moment you start. It owes much of its styling to old school beat 'em ups like Streets of Rage and Final Fight while maintaining its own presence. The combat is fun and feels like the developers took those games and said "What if we added over-the-top spells and skills into an already diverse cast of characters." However the game is not by any means perfect, and you will find yourself playing the same dungeons over and over and over again which to many can get very monotonous and put them off of the game. Even still, if you can grind through the same dungeons you will find an insane amount of fun with this game.
The moment-to-moment combat in Dungeon Fighter is simply fun, juggling around massive amounts the game's various creatures and characters feels satisfying and the Devil May Cry styled ranking on the screen makes you feel like there is something to be gained by doing so, the sprinkling of additional skills every five or so levels also helps keep the game feeling fresh just when you just tired of your last few, and the game's developers have spent the last 10 years of listening and learning from the game's Korean and Japanese communities to perfectly tune the leveling pace so it doesn't feel like you are sluggishly moving through the lower levels nor racing past them to only to hit a brick wall at the higher levels. PvP can be a fun aside to the main game, however the lack of gear matching/equalization or matchmaking, and the way the game handles bad connections make it only a distraction to the meat and potatoes; the PvE.
My main problem arises once you hit the higher levels and the progression slows down along with the dusting of new skill you get, for me once I reached that point (around level 50 for me) I was more interested in making a new character and trying out their skills than continuing to progress with my current one, another huge gripe is the antiquated Fatigue Point (FP) system. The FP system forcibly bogs down your daily progression by only allowing you to enter 156 rooms per day resetting at 9:00am UTC , this system feels like a relic brought over from other regions and should be stripped from the game for a global market.
Neople's commitment to frequent content update, events, and bug fixes and outright refusal to take money for the first few months affirms to me that this wasn't a quick cash grab and was done in passion so their game could reach a lager audience, while this is the second incarnation of Dungeon Fighter Online, after Nexon North America shut down their version in 2013, it seem that this one will have more staying power with development and publishing coming direct from the source. The conversion rate to their premium currency "CERA" seems fair, and items inside the item shop are either quality-of-life items such as inventory/safe expansion, EXP multipliers, or additional dungeon resurrection tokens, or cosmetic avatar items and pets. Everything feels fair and it is very possible to see all the content in the game without paying a dime.
If you want to see what a modern beat 'em up can be, this is an excellent look at a picture of that. Even with all the flaws I mention I still find it hard not to recommend at least trying the game before writing this off as simply and pure nostalgia play, and if you find that you enjoy it there is enough content to satisfy you for quite a while.