Dragon Ruins II

Это просто топовая игрушка-бормотушка! Графика высший класс! Саундтрек - мое почтение! Еще бы ачивки завезли разрабики...

A completely different beast from its predecessor. Now featuring equipment, skills, and a ton of dungeons, each with multiple missions and bosses. Not as casual as the previous one due to its increased complexity, but still worth every single minute spent. You can get endless hours of playtime if you want to beat the game with multiple party compositions. The only things this game is missing are meaningful synergy between party members, equipment, and skills, as well as a definitive endpoint, which can be good or bad depending on who you ask. That being said, after 20+ hours of gameplay, the repetition in dungeon layouts, and the fact that bosses are always in the same spots, start to make the experience feel a bit stale, despite the novelty of experimenting with different party compositions. To give players an incentive to explore the entire dungeon each run, I would add an additional dungeon featuring a living dungeon system where the layout changes when you enter without using a portal, bosses and boss rooms are randomized, and the objective can shift to destroying a dungeon core or the dragons protecting it. Beating the dungeon would prevent it from resetting on the next run, regardless of how you exit, allowing you to keep the layout you cleared, while leaving early without a portal would cause it to regenerate and change. This would help eliminate the sense of monotony from repeating the same dungeon layouts and allow players to farm it if they want.

Precisamos de mais jogos simples como este. Espero que tenham muito sucesso para continuarem aprimorando o visual, mas sem perder a simplicidade da jogabilidade e o charme dos estilos dos anos 90.

For when your brain is pudding, but you still want to delve into the earth, or raid a keep full o evil wizards, and be utterly wrapt in crispy pixel graphics, moody portrait art, pleasingly crunchy sound effects and stirring adventure midis. Good and super simple dungeon fun. Which is not to say it can't get intensely hairy, down in those hoary depths. (Take Warren the Cleric, and give people the healer perk when you can. Healing everybody a smidgen after every battle is reeeallly good.)

alot more fun than expected

Great relaxing game. no stress no fuss. plus the longer you play, the better it gets.

The auto-combat while exploring is revolutionary and so smart. I love it. If the dungeon design had more visual interest than just bland hallways itd be a 10/10. As it stands, still excellent. Great music, too.

The game is just alright - for full price I would not recommend it but on sale for a few dollars its not bad for a time waster. The battles are automatic so you are basically playing a manager who stands back while your adventurers do all the battle and just manage their gear and leveling. I feel with a bit more effort the third game could double down and make this more of a management game while still having the casual dungeon crawl experience. The art is very nice and what really pulled me in - if this series was more involved like Wizardry or EO I would definitely buy it up.

Review in progress: On the whole DR2 resolves most of the things I disliked about DR1 (returned after an hour). It's a good game that's tapping into an interesting concept but I'd say not a great game, and it leaves a bit of potential on the table. For the reviews that say 'what's the point' it is true it is semi-idle, and while it's possible to discover that's not for you, I'm surprised by the reviews that are surprised that it's automatic combat resolution when that's front-and-center. That said, after 90 min or so I do have a couple observations on places where I think it still comes up short a bit: 1) The town UI could definitely be better, or at bare minimum include a little orientation. It took me longer than it reasonably should have to find that the guild is for level ups (just call it 'Trainer' instead?), and working through gear changes is just clunky. The shop is ok but seems like selling could be streamlined. 2) While I can live with quest givers re-using the same maps - not great, but acceptable at the price point - I do wish they at least reset a 'fog of war' effect, or just reset the map and test my memory. 3) Not quite as bad as the first, but early on gold is the major bottleneck. You might have 3 characters ready to level up but only enough gold for one. Which doubly sucks because xp freezes for those characters. Certainly some friction/bottleneck is a good thing in games, but I think this needs a bit of rethinking if there's going to be a DR3. I think the biggest issue is the number of mob types who don't drop gold should come down, or the ones that do should drop 10% more or something. 4) I also think a 3rd entry needs more differentiation between classes other than the visual. I took the priest (cleric?) thinking I'd get at least decent healing out of it and...even at level 14 I still only get the +1 heal at end of combat, which is apparently a skill my fighter also could learn. That's both weird and a minor bummer.

What do you get when you take the idea of a classic Dungeon Crawler and whittle down or streamline everything not about the core loop of crawling, getting rewards, and leveling up? Everything else, from story, to graphics and sound design is intentionally minimal and practical. That doesn't mean that this game looks or sounds bad, but it's all to serve the purpose of getting you into the dungeon and fight some baddies. The soundtrack in particular is very fitting dungeon synth. Mechanically, Dungeon Ruins II feels very much like an idle game except that you need to manually move your party around, but without the additional expansion options that such an idle game would include. Combat is completely automated, with the only real mid-crawl decisions being 1. Do you think you can make it back to the entrance before you die? 2. Who should be in the front vs rear row? Classes are differentiated by their singular starting skill, and their general stat distribution. Periodically when your dudes level up, they'll unlock new abilities, but there is no real "skill tree" - only a handful of randomly selected options shared between all classes, including the starter skills. This means that you can get to the point where every adventurer has the same "healing cleric" skill, etc, and these will stack. Equipment selections come down to "status effects" (which are effective, but do not stack), the base stats used for damage calculation, and stat boots. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this little gem, though it seems that I've seen most of what there is to see. I managed to make it through several of the dungeons before deciding that while this was very relaxing, I'd rather be playing something a little more involved for now. I may come back and reinstall later. Whenever that may be, this is the sort of game that is incredibly easy to pick back up again. 4/5 Graphics 5/5 Sound 5/5 Convenience 4/5 Controls 4/5 Overall