The gameplay itself is a little banal at times, but overall, Dungeon of the Endless provides a wide cross-section of genres in an innovative and well-executed way. There are a lot of stats that aren't well explained, and you can't use the directional buttons to navigate the menus, which may be a pet peeve but is incredibly unsettling. The characters' different play styles are negligible unless you're very invested. Some of the intrigue of exploring and fear of dying is lost when you're trying to calculate the number of resources at your disposal. The question remains: How do all of these genres play together? Pretty well, surprisingly. Splattered throughout levels are new party members and upgrades and items that you can equip. Once you find the level's exit and have gathered enough dust to direct it toward that room, one of your characters (you usually start with two) has to carry that fun yellow polyhedron to the end while enemies swarm the floor! Yikes! While this is incredibly exciting, it is pretty lopsided in difficulty compared to the rest of the game, and it changes Dungeon of the Endless into a tower defense title. The end of each level is where everything can go wrong, and that's when frustration levels can quickly rise. It can be intriguing and even infuriating at times, but in a good way. You need to do all of this in addition to trying to find the right balance of resources and offensive and defensive nodes to get you through the game. You can even turn them on and off and redirect the path to different rooms as you learn the layout. Dust determines which rooms can receive the nodes and upgrades you power them with the crystal from the first room, and you gain more dust as you explore. Resources allow you to level up and heal your characters, build modules and nodes to generate more resources and defend your rooms. You select the characters you wish to use and send them off to explore along the way, they battle enemies and collect the main resources of dust, food, science and technology. Unlike its genre-bending brethren, like The Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain, which are more action-based, Dungeon of the Endless also mixes in tactical and strategy elements in a compelling way. In this way, Dungeon of the Endless embraces both roguelike (roguelite, for all you genre elitists) and dungeon-crawling elements, with the game providing different maps every time. From a small, dark room with only the company of your crewmembers and a spinning yellow octahedron, you're tasked with progressing, exploring and fending off foes in the hopes of reaching the exit. After crash-landing in a pod from space, your characters find themselves in a - spoiler alert - dungeon. While Dungeon of the Endless doesn't reinvent the wheel, it does smash together several different wheel parts to make a fun and well-functioning, albeit different, wheel. Dungeon of the Endless embraces this murkiness from several different perspectives gaming-wise, and it delivers a mostly cogent telling of the dungeon-crawling search of safety that we all know - and sometimes love. The fear of the unknown drives many of the decisions we make, but sometimes, we have to dive into the unknown headfirst, without any safeguards or protections to save us.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |