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Dungeon of the Endless

I agree with almost all the points in your write up. The game is too mechanically 'busy' and there are serious pacing issues. I wonder how much better the game would be if they just rebalance the game (hard to do due to all the mechanics).

I also wonder if you won't pick up a copy of SotS: The Pit. It seems right up your alley if you want a hero based turn-based dungeon crawler that can can stream adventures of.
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Dungeon of the Endless and Endless Legend are on a Free Weekend to Sunday 1PM.

DotE is plenty entertaining for a free play weekend. At half off, I will likely buy a copy. The wife is enjoying MP with it, and it seems that makes it much harder than the same difficulty setting in SP. I wouldn't want to be doing it without being in the same room or being on voice chat.

We never touched the "Very Easy" setting, just went straight to "Easy". I got to Floor 8 on my first evening, and we got to Floor 7 in MP on the second evening (wife's first) which took up the whole evening.


Comparisons to FTL and other "permadeath" games from recent times may be apt, in all the ways Sulla and others described, but I would also liken them to something else: old time coin-op arcade games. Pac Man and many others had "lives" and some ability to earn extra lives, but DotE offers you multiple heroes to manage and some extras in the dungeon. Lot more extras in SP than in MP, at least in my experiences so far. MP really is not for the weak-hearted. Games like Ghosts n Goblins were oppressively hard, had foolishly unfair mechanics, and weren't the most popular arcade games, but if you caught the bug of trying to top your best performance, you could lose a lot of hours in them.

DotE tops all those old arcade games and Nintendo-era games (platformers mostly, but some variations of side-scrollers with other elements, or some top-down or Zelda-style 3rd person games, and other variations) in one key respect: it has a strong randomization scheme. (I suppose FTL does too; it's still on my to-do list), but considering just how many modern video games are epic fail on randomization and replayability, this should not be taken for granted.

As Sulla points out, the game can't randomize many of its macro elements -- but no game yet invented can pull that off. So I would have to say this one appears to be quite a surprise in being worth one's time and money, even if it does have some flaws. Creative and difficult games, even with a few poor design choices in play, are rare nowadays. Worthy of getting an 80 metascore instead of a 90, perhaps.


- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
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I've really gotten my money's worth out of this one. The randomization is strong in this title, gaining effectiveness because of the numerous simple items that overlap. Map layout, module slots, random events, hero's available, official mods (the pods), merchant availability per floor, research options randomized. There are some macro elements they can't randomize away, but those just hold the game together. I've got only one Steam Achievement left to go (the one for raw amount played) and still having fun with it.

I never touched the "Very Easy" mode, btw.

- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
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