Soldak is an unusual indie company in that it really embraces the principle of "don't reinvent the wheel." There is a small team of artists, a musician, and a writer, but programming-wise this is a one man show and has been for a couple decades now. Some of the UI elements are basically the same thing you saw back in Depths of Peril, and he's even reusing art assets from the space opera Drox Operative series (which also used icons from the fantasy Din's series.) Even if the same UI and many underlying mechanics like diplomacy are the same, however, Soldak still manages to make very different genres of games while still carrying forwards some of the mechanics that worked well in the last games.
As you can probably tell at a glance, Din's Champion lives in whatever you want to call the subgenre of "Terraria-likes." It's vertical 2d, the environment is procedural and destructable, you dig, collect ores, make new armor, kill monsters, repeat.
The thing that makes this different is that basically the entire combat system from Din's Champion is being carried from a top-down isometric action roguelite ala older Diablo games (including that color-coded rarity equipment with random modifiers scheme) to the vertical 2d deformable terrain of a Terraria. Also, unlike Terraria where players rebelled against enemies that destroy terrain, enemies DEFINITELY destroy terrain, and so do your stray shots or the explosions from your fireballs. Stay on a map for a while, and it starts to resemble the late stages of a Worms map, with the entire surface of the map roughly sinking about 20 blocks on average from all the craters from stray explosions. (And that's when you don't have acid-spitting nagas creating whole lakes of acid...)
Soldak's original pitch was that it was essentially like Diablo, but the dungeon fought back. Your town could be raided, the merchants killed, and if you weren't careful, your lifestone (respawn point) could be destroyed and you lose the whole game. (You respawn if you die, it's the lifestone that matters.) This whole concept is ported over into the Terraria-like setup, so you occasionally get hordes of enemies that try to storm your base. Basic defenses like walls or pits are helpful, but they start to send monsters that can actively destroy the walls and just dig their way to your base. (Monsters are also annoyingly immune to things like giant lakes of acid that nagas have vomitted near your doorstep...)
You're here to kill an arch-nemesis, a boss monster that is often a stupidly oversized elite version of a normal enemy (sometimes something like a giant scorpion - which is often a good thing for you, since it means they're too huge to follow you into the tunnel you had to dig to find them.) Give them enough time, and they start creating crises for you, like organizing an attack on your base or putting a curse on the whole area that makes zombie infections more common or just inflicts curses on most of the loot you find. An update relatively recent to writing this review included making the subordinates of the arch-nemesis responsible for giving the boss monster some of its tricks in combat, like the ability to teleport away to retreat and heal if you start to damage it. (An IMMENSELY annoying trait.) If you're a more methodical explorer like me, that lets you kill the minions first to just have one decisive battle, but a lot of people seemed to play the "just dig straight to the arch-nemesis" way, so that retreating thing was apparently important for not letting players get at the final boss too quickly.
Because a core part of previous games was completing a map, then starting a new map with roughly the same objective (in Din's Champion, killing a new arch-nemesis,) in this game, because base building is so central to the concept of the Terraria-like gameplay, you actually take your town with you to new maps. (Which also helpfully means you can kiss the last map's giant craters and acid lakes goodbye.)
The game's balance, meanwhile, is somewhat iffy. Many of the mechanics of the Diablo-like isometric action roguelite game (including most classes and stats and general mechanics for determining damage) are the same, but this game simply does not play like a mostly-open field or a labyrinthine dungeon. You can often be simply too high up for melee enemies to reach you or the giant boss monsters are too huge to follow you into your tunnels. There are melee classes in this game, but ranged characters can usually win most fights before the enemy gets close, if they even [i]can[/i] find a way up the cliff you're firing down upon them from. Even many seemingly melee classes have some sort of skill to throw something like a shuriken to do their weapon damage at range, and why wouldn't you use that 98% of the time?! (And ninja gains a massive multiplier to damage if they use stealth before attacking - it's hard to be stealthy when you're holding onto the blade sticking out of the monster's belly, but if you throw a shuriken and duck behind a block, you can go right back into stealth to get more damage multipliers.) There's mechanics for blocking, which reduces damage, but as every Souls-like player knows, dodging is superior, and unlike Terraria where monsters just need to walk into you, in Din's Champion, they actually need to swing their weapon with a wind-up tell, so just run and kite the monster, instead.
Compared to most other Soldak games, this is a much slower and more deliberate game. (After all, it almost definitionally needs to break up the monster slaughter so you have time to mine.) I actually tend to have to play it with the very slow progression just because there tends to be a flood of events once the "trouble timer" on several quests ticks down and you have the mini-boss the arch-nemesis invited fill its trouble meter and start making new events at the same time the arch-nemesis is also making an event happen, and in the time it takes you to solve those new events, another one just popped up. Especially when quests can be caused by immobile devices like a zombie-horde-calling noise machine buried in a tiny pocket, it can take a lot of time to just [i]find[/i] some objectives, and the clock is always ticking down to another event. I certainly find it more stressful than Drox Operative 2, but it does have its own rhythm.
