Tag dungeon crawl

Dungeon Drafters is a Zelda-like dungeon crawl where you have unlimited lives and a classic SNES look and feel.

Dangen Entertainment provided us a code for their latest title, Dungeon Drafters and it is an experience that quite surprisingly felt both new and nostalgic. How can it be both? I know. it feels weird. Visually the game looks like some of the classic JRPG titles you would play on the Super Nintendo or even the Genesis, with an isometric dungeon crawl. This is most like some of the original Final Fantasy titles. That covers the nostalgia part of it, now on to the NEW. The combat mechanics are a blend of turn based combat, like a tactics game, and merges it with card abilities from a randomized deck. This cards perform actions like rappelling from one end of the map to the other or a flaming sword strike.

As you dungeon crawl through the various stages you will confront monsters and people to save. Sometimes the monsters will attack each other as well. The way to tell the difference is the color of the health bar. If it’s red, then you kill it with extreme prejudiced. If it’s gold however, you need to save them as quick as possible. If this part was explained somewhere I completely missed it. Each chamber of the map seems to get more difficult as time progresses so playing cautiously is important as you rarely get chances to heal. Most enemies can move or act two times per turn where the character I chose had three. Knowing this makes planning your moves even more important because you can force some enemies to lineup to make fighting them easier.

I plan on a minimum of one hour of gameplay prior to writing our reviews.  This game sucked me in and somehow I lost almost three hours and had no idea, I was just having fun while slashing my way through the Glacial Library. Some dungeons are harder than others and I think choosing the library was a mistake this early in my gameplay because I didn’t even complete a single floor before getting killed. Interacting with NPCs leads me to believe we will unlock additional characters in our party through the story which will make stages like this one easier to traverse. Not only did I have a great time with this one but my son who was watching me play enjoyed it as well and even helped me understand some of the ability cards I was using better.

The team at Ratalaika Games have returned along with Stately Snail to release the sequel One More Dungeon 2.

Our friends of Ratalaika Games shared one of their latest titles, One More Dungeon 2, with us and we recently had the chance to sit down and give it a play. We had never heard of the franchise prior to the announcement of this sequel but based on images alone we were excited to dive right in. In both titles you play an unnamed adventurer. I don’t know much of the original storyline but in OMD2 you are held captive by a kingdom of snails, or are they snails and slugs? Either way, they are green and slimy looking, but in a cute way. To earn your freedom, you must run through the dungeons and remove the evil denizens there to keep them from raiding the snail-king’s domain. More than enough justification for me to explore these dangerous spaces.

As I mentioned, the slugs are pretty damn cute and the enemies themselves are rendered in a chunky art style that reminds me of the Super-Hero Squad line that Hasbro released over a decade ago. The stages are randomly generated with each expedition but are hampered by the controls. Most games with a poor controller setup have a chance to make up for this by having easier gameplay, an engaging story or stellar graphics. The controls for this game are obscenely sticky, making aiming with ranged weapons quite difficult. They were so bad that they turned what would have been a great game into one that is only okay. The difficulty (when set higher) was much higher than I expected and provided a great challenge that was made more frustrating by these same controller issues. Overall we enjoyed the game but, without the necessary controls making it nearly impossible at times, it fell short of its potential.