Review: Dungelot
Should this be on my phone instead of my PC? Oh yeh, I have a Windows phone and there is about as much support for it as there an existing Steam app. In all seriousness, other than the name being a good joke when describing the game itself, there us some fun times to be had here.
I’m going to start with calling Dungelot a grind. That’s coming off of saying that Battle for Blood wasn’t a true grind. Dungelot is a bit more blatant in its grind… that is unless I’m playing the game wrong.
*An hour or three bits of gameplay later…*
Turns out, yes I was playing it wrong. Dungelot is a item-driven game, but it is more correctly a progress-driven game. What I mean is that you don’t have to fight all the enemies and from what I’ve come to experience, it can actually be better for you if are able to grab all of the loot without encountering any enemies. This is seriously counter-intuitive for the likes of me. This is especially true when you make me a paladin and then have me walk past hordes of undead to beat a dungeon. You simply need to get to the bottom of the dungeon without dying of HP lose or starvation. The kicker is, while you may progress in the game by getting to the end, if you kill everything on a floor you are rewarded with a chest that can have some pretty useful loot. Is this the only way to get certain items? I’m not really sure. I also can’t remember where I got some items and that kind of frustrates me since killing a lot of things in this game is a gamble that I don’t like to take. Who cares if you have a lot of items if you don’t have the HP to make it to the end?
The first few dungeons or so are rather simplistic and they move up in difficulty quickly (especially if you’re trying to kill a lot of things). You’ll be walking around these RNG’d dungeons trying to get to the last level and while concept sounds easy enough I want to emphasize the “walking” bit. If you go around clicking around all willy-nilly, you will end up regretting it sooner rather than later. There are enemies that benefit greatly from being surrounded by other blocks and some enemies get buffed when you kill others. If you let too many of them gather and you haven’t discovered the key to the door for that level yet, you could be in for some work. There are some baddies that will take damage for other monsters and some that get buffed when you kill other monsters as well. So there may be only one block left and you may have to kill more than just one monster to get there.
Naturally, the more you play, you’ll get a pretty good idea of which ones should be dealt with when you encounter them. There are some that are on my “kill on site” list, but even those enemies are spared sometimes if I don’t need to take the chance. If I can get the key, I’ll just grab it and peace out of the level as quick as possible. Is there a reason for killing things other than a random chance at an item? Kind of… if you like temporary buffs and achievements. I hate to admit it, but I’m a mild fan of both. I’ll probably end up going back through just to finish out some achievements. That will come later though. I’ve got three continents to save from… peril? Well, three main bad guys at least. I’ve also got more of this game to figure out.
More Dungelot info: Official Page / Steam / Twitter
