The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians - Enhanced Edition

Honestly, kind of a disappointing game. I flip flopped repeatedly while playing between enjoying it and loathing it - consistently noting that the average player drops it well before even the halfway mark, with 17% of players making it to level 5. Of 20. The game has some interesting concepts - it marries World of Warcraft with the dungeon exploration and stylings of Legend of Grimrock. The dungeons may remind you of Grimrock, but the gameplay diverges - there is no "dancing around enemies" here, combat is entirely a static affair of setting up your rotations using active pause or macros, with few exceptions for enemy AOE or special abilities that root them in place in order for you to move away or get pwned. Otherwise, enemies are absurdly fast - god help you if you need to maneuver them (and unfortunately, sometimes you *do* have to maneuver them). As for the World of Warcraft elements, it shamelessly rips abilities and classes right from WoW - "Protectors" (the games stand in for Warrior) use abilities literally called Thunder Clap, Rend, and Devastate. This would be fine - I used to main tank as a Protection Warrior in my youth, and so logically I should take to a game like t…

I played this game for about 8 hours and reached the level 2 dungeon. I think the game is good, but just not my cup of tea. This is a combat-focused dungeon crawler, and it does it quite good! The main reason I quitted playing was that the real-time-with-pause design was not what I favored. For me one of the reason why I play a dungeon crawler is that I like turn-based combat, so that you don't need to keep yourself on edge all the time. The real-time-with-pause design also makes the UI somewhat confusing and hard to be followed. in my 8 hours of playing about half of the time I was reading online guides trying to figure out what is going on. And after a lot of reading it seemed that my combat result was still not improved. I was confused and finally decided to quit. So if you can figure out the combat mechanism I guess you can get certain amount of fun out of this game.

I have no idea how this has an average of very positive in the reviews. I'm kind of mad at the YouTube streamer who somehow tipped me toward buying this. Enemy variety and combat are very boring, items/gear are uninspiring, the UI is very janky from the moment the tutorial starts and conversational choices start popping up in the bottom left every few seconds, the enemy animations and attack/spell effects are bad. The first few secret rooms I found were one empty grid square with a single potion on the floor in the back right corner. What really tipped me over to quitting the game after 99 minutes was the first boss fight. Everything about it was bad: the setup of the boss room where you're attacking from above, the boss's special freeze in place ability and high HP and healing rate, the poor UI queues on when you're supposed to "kick" to interrupt his special ability, how fast he moves to track you when you jump down off the ledge, so he's nearly impossible to move around toward the exit. It was basically a war of attrition and healing party members and waiting for ability cooldowns and the slow decline in the boss's HP, and sometimes moving out of the way of his area attack.…

After several years of sitting this in my backlog, I have finally completed this game. Curiously enough, I went to research the developer of the game, Mana Games, to see why exactly did this developer make this game? If you look at their library, all you can see are tennis games, yet this one sits out above all of them as the only non tennis game. Well I did some research and found their blog which they indicate that this was an attempt to create something outside of their formula, and while they did enjoy developing this game, the game didn't actually sell well, probably because Dungeon Crawler genre is very niche overall. Unlike metroidvania genre where thousand indie devs made all kinds of metroidvania clones, dungeon crawlers are only few and between, and this is probably the main reason why: Unless it's Legends of Grimrock, you are not gonna get a lot of sales from it. Nevertheless we are here. Let's give a fair and honest take on this, even if this is developers only attempt at a dungeon crawler. Positives: I actually like the level designs. There are 20 levels in total and they all have a unique theme involved. In addition to that, the developer gave a map editing tool so…

This is really not a dungeon crawler for a fan of the action blobbers of yore like Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder, but more a cross between the grid-based turn-based games in the past like Wizardry 1-7 or Might and Magic 1-5 and WoW-like MMORPGs, which feel so jarringly out of place together. Battle feels almost turn-based, with pausing expected and queuing up abilities for each user, with a 6 second global cool down between each character's actions. I could not get it to feel right in the 90 minutes I played, it just infuriated me every time I had to interact with it. I tried using a more dance-like combat style that I'm familiar with, but that felt even more wrong because those cool downs still needed to happen, and actually timing anything was off. You don't ever tell your warrior to swing a weapon, for example... you initiate combat and wait as these cool downs occur and your characters attack in whatever order they happen to be going at. It was jarring back in Stonekeep when your RNPCs attacked like this but at least your MC attacked when you wanted, where you wanted, using whatever item or spell you chose right away. I don't think I can get along with the combat syste…

A Dungeon Master-like with MMO-inspired combat that actually works surprisingly well, though it tends to get too busy for my taste. Combat offers a solid and unconventional challenge with some fun (again, MMO-inspired) boss fights to break things up. My main issue with this game is that it's just too long. Fifteen floors would have been about right; twenty is just too much. Cutting some of the less-memorable floors would have tightened it up. I also wish loot was better. All treasure is randomly generated, and there are so many stats and sub-stats (some of which feel redundant) that even top-tier items were rarely worth using.