Work in some RPG-style leveling to even out the tone and you’ve got Dungeon of the Endless. All of these things must be done on the fly as you guide your heroes in exploration through the dungeon. While it mashes together the perma-death and procedural generation typical of rogue-likes, the game also factors in aspects of tower defense games, such as resource management and tactical planning. And before you can even hope to survive getting the crystal from point A to point B, you need to make sure the route is adequately defended.Īmplitude Studios relishes in the notion that in this game, the player will be forced to somehow move quickly while maintaining a carefully planned tactical precision. Before you can move the crystal, though, you need to find the end of the level. To escape, they must carry a crystal from their landing point to the end of the dungeon. On its face, “Dungeon of the Endless” is a genre-bending tale of the crew of a prison ship who have crashed onto an alien planet. But once you get up close and put your hands on the thing, it becomes immediately apparent that it is quite unlike anything you’ve played before. It’s brain is a tower defense game, it’s skin is a dungeon crawler, and it’s heart is a procedurally generated rogue-like. At a distance, it’s a game that looks familiar, a strange amalgam of gaming conventions piecemealed together Frankenstein-style. Make no mistake, “Dungeon of the Endless” is an incredibly difficult game. Was I really good at video games, or had I been living a lie my whole life? Had I just been incredibly lucky with every other video game I’d touched until now? Did I really beat that Sandcrawler level on Super Star Wars without dying, or have my parents been coddling me into a nest of deceit and false praise since I was a child? In fact, I died so many times in the first two hours of playing this game that for a moment, I had a serious existential dilemma. So I tuck my hubris into my front pocket and get going. If I had a nickel for every time a game told me I couldn’t take my time and painstakingly plan out every movement and decision I make, I’d be able to fulfill my lifelong dream of swimming around in a vault of cash, my wildest Scrooge McDuck fantasy. “Staying put won’t help,” the tutorial screen tells me.
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