Legend of Dungeon
Developed by Robot Loves Kitty
Legend of Dungeon is a randomly generated dungeon crawler that has you going through 26 floors to find a massive treasure and make your way back to the surface with it in tact. A slew of items, potions, hats, and powerups help you on your journey as you face many different enemy types, secrets, and traps. While the game tries a lot of interesting concepts and uses a beautiful art style, unfortunately it is also a game plagued by issues such as lack of depth and variety which leads to repetitive gameplay. Legend of Dungeon is a game that is well supported by the developers and updated frequently, so content and feature additions have at least become a regular thing since it’s release.
The gameplay of Legend of Dungeon has you running around an 8-bit style dungeon fighting a legion of enemies. Some of these are simple while others seemed impossible to take out and easier to avoid. On each floor, your object is to find the exit while balancing the proper exploration to gain RPG style levels and stats to help you take on the tougher enemies the further down you make it. A lack of a map system can make it challenging to realize where you are going and I frequently found myself disoriented and lost during my adventure. This gives a nice sense of exploration, but also can be a bit frustrating. Each floor seems to be covered in secret areas that are triggered in a variety of ways. Pits filled with lava give you instant death, but sometimes also served me well in eliminating enemies on the floor. A double edged sword.
What really fuels Legend of Dungeon are the random game elements. You begin with a simple weapon, but as you explore and progress you will find more powerful weaponry. Hats and masks add humor to the game and serve as helpful items that boost your stats. Some of these hats also seemed to serve as deterrents such as a beehive hat that constantly let out bees. I’m not sure if these were enemies or not, but I definitely had the ability to kill them. Playing around with the items is the only way to figure out what is the best combination and things such as potions have to be drank to figure out the positive or negative results. The game also has apples to regenerate some of your health and beer to make you disoriented and leads to you running around in random directions. During my hour with the game, I didn’t fully come to understand the purpose of beer and it only seemed to have negative effects. There were definitely stats on the bottom that were increased by it, but I could not figure out which specifically as everything is represented by icons with little instruction.
My initial reaction to the game was a bit of frustration as I tried to use my Xbox 360 controller to control the game. Right off the bat, I was forced to set my own controls as no default scheme was present. The controls I set felt uncomfortable and clunky because I simply didn’t know what would be the best layout and how the scenarios would work. After a few tries, I opted to just reset the controls and use a keyboard – unfortunately once I had rebound the controls there was no way to reset it back to default. Seems like a bit of a miss on the part of the developer. The game controlled fine, but having to make my own scheme I ended up constantly hitting wrong buttons and never found a comfortable layout. Maybe after a few hours things would feel more natural, but I constantly ended up throwing my sword and having to go back and pick it up instead of switching to wield it.
The highlight of this game for me is the beautiful voxel based graphics and lighting around the world. This is a game that was programmed with Unity and the lighting really pops out because of it. I love the style so much as it feels incredibly retro while still having that fresh shiny new paint on it. In a time where pixel based graphics feel overused and a bit tiresome, this still manages to stick out and stand above the rest.
Legend of Dungeon is a game that originally was announced as a Kickstarter campaign that went well over it’s funding. It’s great to see successful campaigns get turned in to games, but also see the developers support the game long after it’s initial release. Looking on the Steam forums, I saw many complaints about missing features that were later added to the game as a labor of love and a service to the community. It’s no wonder that this game was successfully greenlit on Steam with such a connection to the fans and just a development team that truly believes in it.
There are things I love about this game and other things that I’m not a big fan of. I’m on the fence on this one. I found the game a bit boring at times and the fact that you have to go down 26 floors and then back up makes it seem like a game that would take hours for a single playthrough. With a permadeath rogue-like gameplay style, this seems a bit frustrating to me and I don’t know if it’s a game I would want to invest the time to complete. If you enjoy this style of game and love artistic games, this is one you may want to check out. I did definitely enjoy the sense of humor and the variety in items and may go back and try it again at some point, but I do think there are better games of this genre on the market. The game has a fair price and great support and that’s definitely worth a lot to the average consumer. Check it out if you’re interested!
For the boring statistics part of this game, I played it for 1 hour and had a few decent length runs and a lot of short ones.
braktheman 