There’s that in style adage: “be careful what you wish for, or you just might get it.” As somebody who loves dungeon crawlers and party-based RPGs, I’m at all times on the lookout for the subsequent one to play. What we’ve got with Dungeon Encounters is a recreation that looks as if it was designed solely for somebody like me, however am I actually getting my excellent recreation?

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If you’re somebody who loves video games about deep storylines, lovely graphics, and tons of the way of taking part in, then Dungeon Encounters just isn’t for you. The story is informed with a one-paragraph abstract at the beginning after which is barely referenced once more. All it is advisable to know is that there’s a dungeon stuffed with monsters and loot, you might have a celebration of adventurers…and scene.

The solely graphics the sport has are the characters working across the dungeon, character portraits on your get together and enemies and that’s it. The “dungeon” is actually a set of tiles that might take a look at house on graph paper with numbers denoting occasions and enemy assaults.

This is as pure of a recreation about numbers as one can get. Every character in your get together begins at comparatively the very same stats and skills as everybody else. Gear is your one and solely manner of enhancing the capabilities of your get together. Every character within the recreation has a bodily protection, magical protection, and HP stat. Different weapons and spells will goal completely different defenses, and you can’t damage an enemy’s well being with a sort of harm till you take away their respective protection. Because of this, gear is a large deal, as each enhance in your injury means with the ability to take away an enemy’s protection in fewer turns. There are a number of retailers to purchase gear from, and enemies can typically drop objects after defeating them. What’s attention-grabbing in regards to the recreation is that weapons can both do fastened injury or randomized injury primarily based on the gear itself.

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Where expertise and leveling are available is that each piece of drugs has a PP value that’s depending on the character’s stage. The stronger the gear, the upper value it’s to equip. One factor that Dungeon Encounters does very properly is make the hunt for loot significant. Every sort of drugs has completely different rankings of it that go up by way of its PP value and the influence it has. When an encounter ends with you discovering a brand new weapon or armor piece, that could be a enormous deal as a result of it’ll typically imply an enormous bump stat-wise for certainly one of your get together members. You also can unlock gear to point out up within the shops by defeating enemies.

There is that this sense whereas taking part in the sport that regardless of the RPG trappings you’re not likely taking part in an RPG, however extra like an enormous puzzle with numbers, and that goes with the dungeon design itself.

Treacherous Tiles

Every flooring of the sport is 100% handmade and linear; the one X issue is that enemy encounters are randomly positioned everytime you enter a flooring. All the factors of curiosity, puzzles, loot drops, and skills you may unlock, have been hand-placed. Abilities will both present your get together with a profit, allow you to manipulate area exploration, or can be utilized throughout fight for an edge. In phrases of interplay, the skills are essentially the most hands-on you’re going to get exterior of fight orders.

whereas backgrounds change, the tiles stay the identical

Because all the things is fastened, it means that there’s this alternate play of fixing the puzzles and clearing each flooring 100%.

Not solely does this offer you extra skill factors to mess around with, however that is the way you get data on the enemies that may present up, discover helpful assets, and resolve the as-for-mentioned puzzles. As an instance, poison is a really harmful ailment on this recreation that simply eats via well being ignoring protection. Getting poisoned is unhealthy as there are just a few methods to treatment it exterior of reviving lifeless characters. One of the early “puzzles” within the recreation has a reward that grants your get together poison immunity for so long as the flexibility is provided, and there are corresponding skills for all the key aliments.

If you attempt to rush via and don’t get the skills out there, it turns into more and more seemingly that one enemy’s particular assault will one shot your complete get together. There are hidden characters together with character-specific gear you will discover, however I can completely guarantee you that the primary problem of the sport just isn’t constructed on the unique gear. There are methods of breaking the sport with the fitting gear and skills, nevertheless it’s as much as you to determine it out.

The Perfect Game?

Dungeon Encounters is a type of video games that I wouldn’t say is “good” within the sense that it’s welcoming to everybody. I put the enchantment of it alongside the identical strains as taking part in idle video games: a recreation that’s simply all about mechanics with nothing else to get in the way in which of these programs.

Nothing about this recreation feels prefer it was put in as an afterthought or the developer not understanding the design. This just isn’t meant to be a recreation you play endlessly, however the excellent encapsulation of dungeon crawler gameplay. The problem will be intense for folks not aware of dungeon crawlers — good luck in your first corpse run. This is a type of video games the place inside minutes, and even seconds of loading it up, you’ll know when you’re the fitting viewers for it.

the ability curve of latest gear scales properly with the development

The downside with such a minimalistic expertise is that even for somebody like me, I began to really feel the loop was getting stale with out new components thrown in, very like once more, in an idle recreation. Eventually, the sport turns into a battle of numbers over ways. If you keep in management and probe for the skills you want, you’ll be tremendous. Make one mistake, tackle one encounter exterior of your depth, and your complete run could possibly be put into jeopardy. There is one thing very cathartic in regards to the development curve of this recreation: going from preventing enemies and doing injury within the teenagers, to ultimately tens of 1000’s of factors between you and the enemy teams.

If you’re the sort of one who desires to go dungeon crawling for no larger cause than “because it’s there” then Dungeon Encounters is the sport for you.