After spending the best part of a morning playing Endless Dungeon, there’s no question that Amplitude Studios has remembered its roots. A massive departure from the strategy titles the studio is known for such as Humankind, or the Endless Space series Dungeon is based on, this feels at once a love letter to the universe the developer has created, but also a way to branch out into mass market appeal.
That said, Endless Dungeon is incredibly complex. On the surface, if you were to watch it in action, you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s a simple twin-stick shooter. While the combat is exactly that from an isometric/top-down angle, it’s also a tower defence game, a dungeon crawler, a loot game, and has RPG elements as well as plenty of lore for fans who want that kind of thing.
You’ll spend a lot of time here, upgrading and crafting.
At its core, Endless Dungeon is a three-player co-op experience that relies heavily on teamwork, since your resources for creating towers (food, science, industry; and more actually) are shared. Should you decide to spend all of your science on things, your team will also have none of that resource left. If you’re the bad one in the team and use all your health items, they will also lose those items. And yes, buying health back costs resources which, well, you probably get the idea now, but you share those resources, remember?
Thankfully every door you open in the procedurally generated dungeon will grant you more of these resources. You can find generators that will boost the amount gained per door, but also research stations to buff you, your party, or specific members of the party. Every room has a plethora of preordained spots to drop turrets that range from simple guns to light-guns that are strong against dark-type enemies, or EMP bursts to slow down robotic enemy types.
She may be a Momma, but she’s still going down.
As I say, Endless Dungeon is complex. All of these mechanics are marrying together in real time seconds. You don’t have much time to think, because your Crystal bot (the tower part of the tower defence) needs to be moved to the end of the level without being destroyed, or it’s game over. You’re trying to do this, but you’re also trying to make a particular run go well by finding better weapons, buffs, and lore drops from chests. Hell, there’s even a merchant you can run into who might sell you a rocket launcher – just remember to run it by your teammates first, before you use all of the resources on it, and also note it’s powerful but incredibly slow. Everything is a trade-off, it seems.
Underpinning all of this is the overarching lore. Before you start a mission you are chilling in a canteen where you can bring things back, upgrade individual characters, chat to non-playable characters, or just check out the cosmetics in the wardrobe. There are eight playable characters coming when the game launches on May 18, and they range from simple damage per second style heroes, to bizarro support characters who reap souls when they beat enemies which can be used in turn to heal teammates in battle. Each of the selectable characters has two abilities that can turn the tide of battle, and recharge over time, or based on how many enemies you kill.
It’s pretty looking, but hugely complex.
Every character can also equip a purchasable (or findable in-game) buff, and these range from no-brainers to serious risk-or-reward types. One example came while I was playing DPS hero, Zed. I grabbed a buff from a chest that gave me 100% extra damage, but also gave me 100% more damage taken. This made Zed a proper killing machine, but all of a sudden meant I could be taken out with a couple of swipes from most enemies, and switched me from being a front-of-the-fight player, to the back of the pack.
As if all of this weren’t enough to take in, Endless Dungeon also makes use of elemental effects. Bugs are weak to fire; robots are weak to electricity. The game is constantly demanding that you think on your feet. You might uncover an area that spawns robots, so should you risk dropping a non-electric turret, or go off and explore for a research terminal, so you can unlock the EMP turret, and come back, thus risking a wave happening in the meantime, but also saving resources.
Each of the eight launch characters is viable.
It took quite a while for Endless Dungeon to get its hooks into me, I must confess. There is simply so much going on, and in truth, while there is a tutorial, it needs a bit of work. By the time you head into the game proper, you’ll be armed with some very basic knowledge, but have seen hardly any of the things you might discover on a given run. So much can happen, and so much can go wrong; it’s only with practice you’ll learn to feel confident. That said, by the end of my time, I was exploring with confidence, and understanding that opening doors might gain my team goodies, but can also open a quick route for enemies.
So no, it’s not a grand strategy game, but Endless Dungeon has plenty of tactical and strategic elements about it. It’s neither Diablo nor Dead Cells, but it is a dungeon crawling roguelike. It’s familiar enough, but complex and fresh feeling, and it definitely has something about it. In its current state, I did experience quite a few bugs, but there’s plenty of time for the team at Amplitude Studios to sort that out, and being completely clear: this isn’t a game that’s for everyone. It’s hard to think of too many games in the genre that offer quite the depth this one does, and time will tell if the game sticks the landing in a crowded pack, but this just could be the thinking man’s dungeon crawling twin stick shooter roguelike rpg you never knew you wanted.
Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing how the co-op works out in the wild, without a developer there to walk us through it.
