Only one thing about Endless Dungeon is endless: the game’s desire to kill me

Only one thing about Endless Dungeon is endless: the game's desire to kill me

Got it, Endless Dungeon. So you’re best played in co-op. Of course, in solo mode, switching between characters, which are also AI-controlled, is a nice option. Especially since you can also use the individual abilities of the different heroes. But a game that is about reacting flexibly to dynamic situations and getting the best out of few resources just blows the fuse for me often enough.

There’s a method to that, of course: This game wants to overwhelm me, it’s kind of the bread and butter of this not-so-endless dungeon, even though this sequel to the cool Dungeons of the Endless gives you a little more control than last time. Instead of just sending your characters into the individual rooms and letting them do their thing there, you now control them directly, as the introduction already mentioned, in the manner of a twin-stick shooter.


Looks right like something you want to play, doesn’t it?

The optics have also been modernized, instead of pretty pixel art, there is now chic, stylized 3D graphics that accompany explosions and destruction effects with comic-like “blam” overlays. Colorful and somber at the same time, the look reminded me a bit of the brilliant Netflix series Arcane. Otherwise, however, the process of Endless Dungeon is quite similar to that of Dungeon of the Endless. Gradually you open new rooms of these procedurally generated dungeons, collect raw materials and upgrades for your characters and then place defenses in exchange for resources at building points in order to master the waves of enemies.

Once again, the goal here is, after discovering the exit, to maneuver a crystal there, which this time is walking toward its destination on a spider robot. So it will no longer burden one of your party members with it. If your mechanical buddy starts moving, the toughest and basically endless wave of enemies will start – now you have hopefully secured the route to the exit and you have a plan of when you have to defend where.

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There’s a lot of tactics involved, because you can’t just set up your systems everywhere, if only for cost reasons. When exploring the dungeon for the first time, you always have to weigh up whether you want to earn food, production or research points (these are distributed with each new room by the responsible generators), which in turn influences what you can achieve and when. Farm too little research and you’ll have to complete the level with the basic equipment, with the normal guns, slowdown fields and shield systems. In turn, maybe your characters are better equipped for this?


Make the most of what little you have and align your talents and you might fare better than me.

And then there is the question of where you want to build the defenses. Would you rather protect in a balanced way and slow down the enemy in many places, or seal off a particular weak point as well as possible? The next variable then comes through the layout of the dungeon. Even opening a new door, behind which there is an additional monster spawn point, can suddenly stumble your defenses, which have just been stabilized. It is currently not yet possible to dismantle facilities and get back the resources you have used. But Amplitude is working on a system to relocate them. Upgrades are already possible anyway.

Your approach will also vary (or at least it should) depending on which upgrades you’ve unlocked. For example, you can equip your spider robot with crystals in such a way that you get a bonus to firepower against enemies that are in the bot’s line of sight. Of course, this speaks for a tactic in which one does not move away from him if possible. Keeping an eye on the circumstances of the level and at the same time playing to the strengths of the characters equipped with the typical talents from tank to crowd control to sniper: Keeping this act of balance is what wins and loses in a run definitely.

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I had a lot of fun doing this in the extended developer session. Although I bit the dust just before the exit several times, I always thought straight to the next attempt and what I could do differently this time. Only to be caught on the wrong foot by a fresh dungeon layout just enough that I can’t just downplay my boot. The meta level hasn’t been shown in depth yet – it’s a bar in space – but it’s already clear that there will be a lot of variance in the levels already with the choice of characters.


It caught me several times on the last few meters when my crystal bot gave up the ghost just before the door banged. Every run was exciting.

The performance alone was not satisfactory for the moment. The impressive play of light and shadow, some of which is realized using ray tracing, even caused my PC with RTX 3080 to regularly slip below 30FPS when things got really busy. But there’s still a long way to go before the game comes out. First of all, Endless Dungeon will soon start an open dev phase, for which you can apply behind this link can. Anyway, I’m looking forward to further exploring the depths of this dungeon and now I really want to dive into Endless Space 2 again.



Reference-www.eurogamer.de