Dungeon of the Endless

A very odd mish-mash of genres, bolting a Tower Defense game onto a Roguelike Dungeon Crawler (or vice versa), with other aspects of resource/economy and hero management. By and large though, all these systems do come to complement each other pretty well, even if not perfectly.

While the games' tutorial is functionally non-existent, once you start to understand what is expected and what is _broadly_ a winning strategy in DotE, the core gameplay loop is actually very fun. You explore a dungeon one door at a time to gain resources and find loot, but then are faced with a wave of monsters (akin to a wave in Tower Defense) to defend against. Once cleared, you have all the time you need to strategise, assess, and then repeat the door-opening process.

Once you get the hang of this it is very enjoyable to go through this loop - however DotE is a tough, tough game that does not pull punches, and due to the Roguelike nature of the game it can quickly sour the mood. A successful run of this game is ~6 hours worth of gameplay (which is too long, I'd cut the number of floors down), which is asking a lot to get right consistently, and extremely frustrating to throw away 3-4 hours worth of time and effort down the tubes. DotE doesn't _always_ play fair either unfortunately, randomness may be a fickle mistress but some quirks in design make this game feel downright unfair or "cheap", which for something already so tough and long is just salt in the wound.

Definitely worth taking the game for a spin and beating on Too Easy difficulty (ha ha guys, very funny), and may come back to this to try the other pods which do change the gameplay quite a bit (I just stuck to the default Escape Pod) - whether I have time or inclination is another story.

Dungeon of the Endless has a few influences, from turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, roguelike, and tower defence.

The tutorial briefly talks about how you can open doors, your characters automatically attack, and you can buy modules to increase your production of the 3 resources; Industry, Food, Science. It tells you to take your crystal to the exit once you find it. However, when you take the crystal, enemies swarm in and will wipe you out. It never tells you about placing towers, or any kind of strategy. The tower defence aspect of the game is quite a large part, so it's such a crazy oversight.

You only have 2 characters at the start and one needs to carry the crystal, who will move far slower than they usually do, and can't seem to drop it - meaning you now have far less attack power and are very vulnerable. To exit the floor, you get the crystal to the exit, but if you click the button to exit without getting your other character there - then you leave them behind.

It's almost like the developers want you to fail the first level several times to work out the actual mechanics of the game. Why can't they just give you a comprehensive tutorial to make sure you can clear a floor? Towards the end of the game there's some icons that appear that seem to signify powerful monsters are there, or maybe going to be there.

The tower slots are small, so the placement originally looks a bit fiddly, and watching them attack seems a little underwhelming. I think you need some powerful looking towers for the satisfaction like in other tower defence games.

As you open doors and kill enemies, you acquire the strangely named "Dust". Every 10 dust can power another room. When a room is powered, enemies can no longer spawn there, and you can place towers, or a module if there is a slot for one. Some rooms can contain something else instead like a crystal that gives you bonuses, or a crystal that allows you to spend your research points.

Rooms can only be powered if they are adjacent to another powered room. Your crystal acts as the source for the power, so there is always a lit path back to it. Some rooms are automatically powered "by a mysterious force". As you go further down the floors, there are more rooms available, and you cannot power them all. It's this aspect where you can get a bit screwed over by the random nature. If the map has longer chains of rooms, then it can be really easy to defend against; whereas lots of side rooms is a problem.

One thing to bear in mind is that enemies only spawn in open rooms. So if you are in a map where there's 2 doors from your starting crystal room, it is best to open one, then fully explore that side. The problem is if you don't find the exit, then you have to open the other door and now there's 2 paths that you need to defend.

Another way you can stop enemies from spawning is to place a character in that room. The problem is if there's other rooms still free, then enemies will spawn there, and then you have to move your character back to help defend. You can leave yourself exposed by spreading your characters in different rooms.

Some characters look like they are based on other franchises like Zero Suit Samus from Metroid. Maybe the Team Fortress style characters are actually those characters. Each character has different attributes and skills. Some require you to click to activate the temporary skill, whereas others are more passive bonuses. Characters acquire more skills as they level up. It's not an experience system though; instead you spend your food. Food can also be spent to heal, buy items at the shop, and hire new characters when you find them. I think there is always a shopkeeper on each level, and he can be attacked by the enemies once you discover him.

If you find a new character, hire them, then survive a few floors, then you unlock them to be able to choose them from the start of your next game. You start with 2 characters and can hire another 2. You can Dismiss them at the cost of a few food.

Despite often needing to place lots of towers on each level, and a few modules, I found that once you get past the first few levels and place industry modules down, you usually have a good supply stocked up and the towers are really cheap. So then you just go all out food since you need a crazy amount of it. I often seemed to have enough Science for how I spent it too.

Since the resources are accumulated with each door opening, it means the return on investment falls as you progress through the floor. With each module you place, the cost seems to increase too, so I generally just placed 3 or 4 down in the first rooms I powered up, then only spent on towers from that point.

Since enemies only spawn in after you open a door, this means it feels like a turn-based strategy. You can move your characters about, place down some towers, then open a door to progress.

You can try and unlock all the doors in order to try stockpile resources, and find treasure chests with items, but it's at the risk of allowing more enemies to spawn if you have unlit rooms open. The game tells you when the map is fully explored. You also have a map where you can check for rooms with doors - sometimes they are easy to miss since they blend into the walls; so the map is easier to view.

Enemies have different attack targets; so some go straight for your characters, some the crystal, or some targeting your constructions. When they do reach the crystal, they attack it, which drains your dust, which will start depowering the rooms to meet the new limit. This can severely hamper you.

Once you decide to take the crystal to the exit, you can rearrange the power one final time. Picking up the crystal leaves any currently powered rooms in power, but you cannot change them once you pick up the crystal. Waves of enemies will start to spawn in so you need to move quickly to prevent you from being overwhelmed.

It can take up to 2 hours to get through the floors, and it's incredibly easy to make a mistake or encounter an unexpected difficulty spike. You are at a massive disadvantage if you lose a character, so can go from feeling like it's a comfortable challenge then being wiped out. It took a while for me to start to like the game, and I needed to do some reading up on how the game works to actually make progress. Initially, I thought it was quite a shallow and boring game which is mainly about opening doors, but there's a bit more to it than that.