Blood Dungeon

It is quite fun! I felt compelled to 100% it. Game gets way easier as unlocks occur. Some charms and spells are WAY too good, some are pathetic (looking at you, teleporter charm.) At no point did these minor issues curb my addiction. If you wish Vamp Surviors had platforming, this is an easy recommend. Needs more content, Messhof! <3

I am on 76% completion, almost got all achievements on steam and decided to write a review because of the criticisms I read about the game. I think some people are missing the point about Blood Dungeon. I'll start by saying that the game has undoubtely some balancing issues - Krug feels really bad to play compared to the other characters, him beign so big is a huge debuff and does not have enough hearts to compensate it. Also harpoon is such a bad weapon that I don't see the design vision behind it. - Reaching level 15 is a bit too hard considering that it's required to unlock upgrades with each character. The main problem is that the run ends immediatly after killing the third boss, so unless you purposefully stall the run by avoiding killing it it's impossible to achieve, even with blood focused charms and spells. An ideal solution would be to add an endless mode. You should probably need less blood to reach higher levels nonetheless. - The amount of charms and spells gets overwhelming very fast, so unless you max them out when you still have only a few of them it becomes annoying to do so. This matters because for example you need Luck spell at level 8 to unlock a bone shop upgrade. They should probably add a way to ban items. - Some weapons are way better than others (bouncing balls) - Flood map might need some adjustments. Oxygen Tank and Fins should be way easier to find in this map (also beign the only map in which they are really useful). It's the one I played the least and I have not beaten it so I don't really feel comfortable talking much more about it. Now as the main reason I chose to write this review. I think many people are playing this game wrong, for a good reason. Survivors-like have accustomed us to a specific playstyle in which the primary way of scaling your power to infinity is by killing enemies and gaining levels which allow us to choose upgrades. In Blood Dungeon the primary way of getting upgrades is not with levels, but with chests instead. Each map has a set of chest spawn locations which never changes; every time you get a chest, another one spawns in one of these locations. If you are used to, let's say, Vampire survivors you'd think these are just an extra to occasionally chance upon. WRONG. You NEED the chests, they are everything you should strive for. The game wants you to constantly rotate through the fixed chest spawns to win. You have to find a route on every map that allows you to get chests in the most efficient way possible. Follow your route, avoid enemies, get chests. This is the gameplay loop, and to be honest I really enjoy it. With this strategy pretty much all builds become viable if you play good enough. The only map I'm not entirely sure about is flood since the routing there is really hard because of the water and I haven't put enough time in it. I've seen complaints about enemies beign too tanky or many upgrades beign not good enough to pick. While the latter may still be valid, I'd argue the problem is that these people didn't reach the second boss or the later waves with enough items because they are mostly relying on levels to get their upgrades. If you think you'd like this "twist" on the survivors genre I think you'll like this game and enjoy its gameplay loop. I can't be 100% sure this is the way the developers intended the game to be played, but in the current state of things everything is balanced around this and I feel like it's a good direction to follow for the future of Blood Dungeon.