I am a fan of Roguelikes. When your character or playthrough is on the line, there is just so much more at stake than being put back at a checkpoint. This has been a bit of a popular idea over the last few years, and Dungeon of the Endless fits in with the others very nicely indeed.
Players start off in a crashed ship using two of the four starting characters. You spend your time opening doors and winding your way through a labyrinth while protecting a power crystal from waves of enemies. Rooms are powered on and off, and can be filled with interesting gadgets like Holo-Heroes or Kip guns. This brings tower defence into the mix, making things rather interesting. Basically, the objective of each floor is to find the exit, set up defences, then bring the crystal to said exit. Be careful! When you pick up the crystal to move it and finish the floor, monsters spawn constantly and from all sides.
Actually the monster spawning system is rather refreshing, and brings a lot of strategy to the game. So basically, monsters will not spawn in powered up rooms. You power up rooms with dust, which is dropped by enemies and given when you open doors. The best strategy I’ve found so far, is to just go as far in one direction as you can and only open up side rooms if you haven’t found the exit. As soon as you find it, set up a strong path from the crystal to the exit and either book it or try to open as many doors as possible.
Doors are your turn counter as well as your resource gathering. You start each game earning a base amount of each currency: Production, Science, and Food. You can build generators to boost the earnings gained from each door. Seeing as your characters can die, it becomes a struggle near the end of each floor between trying to gain as much resources as possible and making sure you can finish the level. You can’t really do that when you’re dead. Sometimes monsters spawn in the room you open, and if you’re not fast enough your characters can get overwhelmed rather quickly.
Your best bet at staying alive is probably picking up another two characters as fast as possible. Extra heroes will spawn on floors, and you can spend food to hire them onto your team. Once you have four heroes, just keep producing food and leveling them up. You can also buy and find items to equip, having chest, weapon, and equipment slots on each character.
Dungeon of the Endless just keeps pulling me back. I’ve gotten so close to that top floor, and I can’t wait to finally beat it. There’s a bit of a learning curve but once you have a good strategy that works for you, I’m sure you’ll be clearing floors in no time. I must have spent at least two hours just getting to the third or fourth floor and dying over and over. Not unlike Faster Than Light, this game can be challenging even on the easy difficulty if you don’t know what you’re doing.
A real hybrid, Dungeon combines a mix of tower defence, real-time strategy, and dungeon crawling into a very fun and entertaining title. It has some great narrative elements as well, and between floors heroes can interact with each other. Be warned! Not all the heroes get along all that well… I found this out the hard way.
I would absolutely pick this up if you enjoy any of the aforementioned genres. It’s most certainly not just another pixel-art indie game, and deserves a chance to show you what it can do. Though mechanically very different, I want to say that fans of Risk of Rain would really like this game. I kept finding little similarities between the two as I progressed that I really liked, such as the way heroes are unlocked or how you move from floor to floor searching for the exit. Can you reach the twelfth floor? Hell can you reach the sixth? Early Access is almost up, so grab a discounted copy while you still can!
