A profoundly strategic, richly layered, cerebral roguelike with great amounts of content and variation, that honors thinking and logic, offering well over one hundred hours of exceptional entertainment to the bravest turn-based masterminds.
Positive:
- From the caricaturistic player portraits, to the fantastically magical sound effects, to the ethereal dungeon lighting, to the cleverly farcical writing, the overall presentation is top-notch, involving all visual and aural elements expertly in ways that enhance the experience while also creating artistic imaginativeness that results in a rare paradigm of the game medium.
- Progression stems from beating dungeons and accumulating gold in order to unlock quests and playable attributes, such as the blend of kins and classes, which may or may not unite to generate some synergistic systems. This amalgamative and multifaceted, continuous advancement, is key in expanding the many mechanics while also extending the activities that one may take part in for results and for kingdom expansion. It all coalesces exceptionally well in involving the player in the framing of their own aggregate in-game evolution.
- Although most of the available kins and classes are recognizable fantasy genre conventions, they are each individually interesting, possessing unique characteristics and specialties, and the resulting synergies between the combinative choices are genuinely distinct and fun to experiment with. One could truly study the many possibilities afforded by the myriad traits and abilities to effectuate astounding syntheses that never become boring.
- From the Kingdom tableau, the player may opt to go into different game modes. The main events are found within the Adventure mode, but Class Challenges and Puzzles offer more difficult and further severe trials for extra money and for special items as rewards for one's efforts. Between the three modes, there is a vast amount of content encompassing a traditional campaign, as well as the bonus modes for those interested in challenges and treasures.
- Balance between dungeons, enemies, attributes, and abilities is impressively impeccable without exception. Certainly, there are optimal ways of approaching situations, and are obvious synergies between kins, classes, and spells, but all gameplay mechanics have been envisioned and conceived to openly accommodate all play styles and strategies, allowing for a multitude of methodologies and techniques for triumphantly downing enemies, killing bosses, and completing dungeons.
- Planning for and beginning a dungeon run fully prepared to engage all possible predicaments and eventual entanglements, then ultimately becoming a powerful demigod that is a destructor of one and all, or ploddingly forging on with just enough to make a flourishing romp of a seemingly indelible boss on one's last turn is the apex of sophisticated expeditions, standing as one of the finest repeatable tours de force in gaming. Killing regular enemies, leveling up, growing one's technical acumen, acquiring powers, yielding items, and slaying bosses is deeply satisfying and as good as it gets in the sphere of intellectual dungeoneering.
- Dungeons and quests come in numerous varieties, possessing diverse particularities, and exhibiting special properties, creating a majestic world of adventures and possibilities that continually amplify the scope of the game from early beginnings to the thematic end, and beyond, obliging playstyles and interests of a wide spectrum. After beating the main story quests, the game may be continued indefinitely, with the most difficult and most challenging dungeons and quests becoming available for further attempts.
Neutral:
- Technical performance maintains 144 frames per second at all times while the software is in the foreground, without any hitches or drops. With that said, alt-tabbing out of the game while in full screen will cause the frame rate to undergo a major momentary drop upon returning to the game's screen. There does not seem to be any way to avoid this, if one has to switch to another window while the game remains open, but this is a small hindrance, as the software's stability is restored almost immediately after focusing on the game again.
- Difficulty escalates quickly, and the learning curve is quite steep. This mixture of mounting complications could potentially induce a deterrent of fun, as well as a barrier for success, as multiple failed attempts per dungeon can eventually become demoralizing and perplexing. Admittedly, the tactical prowess gained by learning from one's mistakes is part of the process of a hands-on mechanic, but the repeated defeats to what at times feels like unwinnable circumstances certainly has its experiential drawbacks.
Negative:
- There are several significant software bugs. Sometimes, entering or leaving a dungeon passage by usage of stairs does not register the action, with the game engine merely reloading the screen, yet not actuating the movement between floors. Walking to another tile, going back to the stairs tile, then selecting to move floors will correct the issue. Often, gamepad button prompts appear on screen, even though the gamepad is not being used, but they eventually disappear. Preventing this occasional glitch seems to be impossible. Selecting certain options from the menu can cause the game to freeze, and the only way to actually exit the game is to end the process with the Steam client. For whatever inexplicable reason, the audio volume can vary depending on the dungeon. Hotkeys sometimes do not register, despite their associated function being actually possible by using the mouse.
Overall rating: 4.0/5.0
