Dungeon No Dungeon

This is a really bad game. For me it was a waste of my money and time. Do not buy this game, especially if you like turn-based games. There are so many things wrong, I don't know where to begin or if I should take the time. I'll try : 1) the art is quite good, images and animations. This is the only positive trait of DungeonNoDungeon. 2) The gameplay is terrible. There is almost no strategic thinking. Many character are mechanically identical, or have very similar moves. This reduce the tactical choices the player could make. Many enemies have hard immunities so the choices are even more reduced. Often the enemies one huge weak spot, so if you can hit it, you just hit it : no strategical thinking needed. There are no (or very few) ways to manipulate your team position, the enemy position. Almost no mechanic to reward good positioning. There is a little bit of timing involved (many ways to stun or freeze enemies) but all rely on RNG. So if timing and positioning are not exploited to give the game tactical depth, what is left ? There is a bit of a Pokemon-style damage type system and that's all. You identify the armor of the enemy and hit them according for extra damage. Fun ? You can't even do that because most character have only access to only one damage type. So the game is around tactical turn-based combat. But they are not fun nor tactical. 3) Aside from combat there is a level-up and item system. It's not good either. There is no skill-tree : when you level you chose between 1 of 3 skill until you unlock all the skill. When a skill is unlocked you have to spend currency to upgrade 3 times. Here again there is not much choice. Not spending the currency for the upgrade is not a viable option. Many of the skill are : "deal X dmg and 5% to apply status Y" or "apply status Y to all enemies". And passive skills are just stat boosts (like reduce Blunt damage taken by 10%). Because of that, Level up is not very interesting. Items are worst. Most of them just give 1 or 2 stat boosts. There are few item with more interesting effect but they drop very rarely and are not so powerful. Consumable : anti-poison, anti-bleed, anti-disease, life potion, armor potion. That's all. Can you be more bland ? 4) On top of skills and items, the developpers added the Quirk system from Darkest Dungeon. Its doesn't impact the gameplay very much. 5) So combat is not good. Character building (skill+item) is not good. Is the world better ? No story whatsoever, I don't mind, that's ok. You navigate the word though a map like in Slay the Spire. Except you have roll a dice every time you move. It doesn't add anything to the gameplay. It's just annoying. If you end your move on a pair of sword you get to fight. If you land on a question mark, you get either a lame multi-choice dialog where being generous (ex: healing a wounded stranger) is always rewarded or you get a minigame. The minigames are not so bad but they are no place in a game like this. Tactical turn-based combat when it is done correctly is already so fun and it's why people buy games like this. So why add minigames ? wierd design choice. Many minigame take 5 minutes to solve and reward the player with a low tier item (worth 1 gold). So most player will end up skipping them. 6) The UI is terrible. There are translation issues. It's tedious to check buff/ailments on ally and enemies. When leveling up you cannot check the unit you are leveling up (whish would be useful to find synergies). Cannot start the game on mute. Navigating from menu to menu is tedious. Etc... there is so much small things done wrong. It all adds up to a poor experience. Conclusion : Hard pass. Do not buy this game, especially if you like turn-based games. It's a total waste.

I thought the idea and premise of being able to Target individual limbs was great, the game got really stale, really quick though. The problem comes with lack of impact and lack of actual feedback resulting in every attack and buff feeling so dry and unenjoyable. See a melee guy? Cut his leg off and he can't do anything. See a staff or Bow wielder? Cut their weapon arm off and they can't do anything. See a beast with no armor? Hit the head and they die. Then you hit a huge stop gap on the bosses being incredibly unfair. Game isn't worth it. I managed to get a puzzle too and it was incredibly frustrating and time consuming. A Timed pipe dreams puzzle would have been much more apt as opposed to a non-timed slide puzzle with one empty space. TL;DR: No satisfaction from play and huge difficulty gap just from bosses.

This game looks like it has a lot of promise, but sadly, I had to refund it. The difficulty ramped up rather quickly and within an hour, all of the characters I had been able to recruit were killed off. In my first run I made it to the first boss, but the boss one-shotted all of my characters each time he hit them. (For context - my attacks were doing 3-8 damage to ONE 'body part' target, but the boss did one attack that did 20-30 damage to ALL of a character's body parts, and another attack that did 50 damage to one) Recruiting new characters costs gold, as does resurrecting but as my gold supply ran out, I had no characters left alive and could not recruit more. There IS a free option to revive your characters, but there is a 24 hour timer before you can use it again (that's 24 REALTIME hours), so therefore, if I want to play again with a 3 person party, I will have to wait 3 days. Unless I am missing something, that seems rather absurd. It's possible that there might be something I am missing, but the game is extremely light on the tutorials, so there's not really clarity on how to progress. I wanted to like this game, but since I have no way to play it for 3 days, I can't reccomend it to anyone. (I am aware that you can start a new campaign, but that completely undoes any feeling of 'progression') I'll keep my eye on updates but definitely refunding it now as it is almost quite literally unplayable except for maybe once a week or so. With the timers and costs, it has the feel of a mobile P2W type of game, but without the actual aspect of buying resources - but it seems like that might be what their intention will be, and if so - that's a hard pass.

TL;DR: Yes, the game has issues, but the devs are putting effort into to fixing them. KS Backer, also inb4 "get good, scrub" Difficulty progression is shockingly off and paid DLC for an UNFINISHED game that just pulled 400% of it's funding goal on KS is unacceptable. Congratulations! You have single-handedly made me never want to back a video game on KS ever again. UPDATE: The developers are trying. I still can't fully recommend this game due to the difficulty progression issues, but not only did they take the paid DLC down, but they're gonna offer it for free and refund anyone who bought it, Additionally, they've given their KS Backers their word that they won't offer paid DLC again till after EA. 302 has also pledged to address balance issues to try and make this game more playable. All they need from us is time. Take a step back and play a different game for a bit, but definitely follow this so you can get news updates.

[h1]Opening/ Information[/h1] Reading a review is not enough? Want to see some footage? Check the link and watch some game footage for yourself and decide if this game is worth your time: https://youtu.be/O9cWJzxZQKg Dungeon No Dungeon is a rogue like Dungeon Crawler game using the art style similar to The Darkest Dungeon but with a way more cartoon style than a realistic one. This is the first game created by 302 Studio Games who is entering the world of Steam with this game and Boy doe they have their hands full at the moment. [h1]How to start this Game?[/h1] Yes I have to make a disclaimer, currently 302 studios is facing an issue making the game unplayable for everyone who's first language is not English or Chinese. What happened? Well the Game code is programmed that he uses the Windows Language Pack to show the textures and everything with letters and numbers. So in case you have not installed and activated the English language pack as your current language the game will be Dark without anything to do. How do you avoid that? Install the English language pack and change your current windows language to English, it is not important if United States or United Kingdom just don't choose Indian or the other English language packs. Now you can play it. [h1]Gameplay / Story[/h1] Let's go into a Dungeon! Oh, why you ask? For treasure? Well no I just want to die! Dungeon No Dungeon is so freaking hard, don't get me wrong it is fun to play but oh my gosh the difficulty spikes so high in Act 2 I have no clue what I have done wrong. You start at the Tavern, getting some booze and hiring people for your new Adventure. The game starts like a typical D&D round. You can choose between a lot of different units. A Fire mage, an Undead Assassin, a Karen Like Paladin, a Summoner its ridiculous how many units you can have, and they all are unique. I played as a slime, a SLIME! Eating people and doing gross slime stuff you know from the Slime magazines. The units can level until level 10 and each skill can be upgraded 2 times. It's great to have this kind of character building. Let's switch to the gameplay. The complicated gameplay. You do not fight like in regular games by attacking and its over. No you choose to attack limps and watch the enemy suffer like the Black Knight in Monty pythons The Holy Grail, did you know that the German call this Monty Python Film Knights of the coconut, its fun, and it's important to use this game mechanic. E.g a Melee unit with one foot missing is not able to fight anymore. You will see that I was a rather fair player and just ripped the arms out and laugh while the enemy was bleeding out. This mechanic is fun until you realize your own units will also suffer from this. And here comes the big issue. The game gives you only one way to restore cut limbs, Potions and you have to find them. This can end up in leveling a completely new character until you find the item and what happens when your unit dies? It is gone forever! You had to see my face when I had to fight against a ghost who was immune to my attacks and while I tried my best to find a solution everyone got their feet cut. Now I have 3 people who can't fight until I find the recovery potion. So much about that. Unforgiving hard, it feels they made a hard mode and Parma death mode and forgot to make it a choice at the beginning of the game. [h1]Pro[/h1] + a lot of different Enemies + Unique heroes with passives and actives + Different Bosses with unique skill sets + You can "Invade" other Players games + Limp Damage makes the game more strategic [h1]Contra[/h1] - Unforgiving, one mistake can ruin your entire safe game. - Boss Enemies can be really unfair - Own units do not heal up when loosing a limb at the end of the Dungeon Run - You can get weknesses rendering your unit useless (e.g perma-3 to damage on a damage dealer ) [h1]Conclusion/ Who will enjoy the game?[/h1] Dungeon No Dungeon offers a creative Dungeon Crawl game with unique units and a really great effort for the Dungeon Crawling genre. Its just so damn hard! The Difficulty does not come from the enemies units or the AI it comes from the lack of information. You can encounter a Mini Boss who is only weak against Holy Attacks. You got no Holy unit here? Well die Chumb! There is even a boss who reflects 50% of your attack back to you. No problem when you have a healer right? WRONG! You can't heal that and having to waste 1 turn without fighting causes the Boss to buff up to a one hit Wonder. The game wants you to level up all units you can acquire and then change them on every Dungeon Crawl. This feel so grindy and due to the Crystals you have to farm to upgrade your skills you have to grind even more. So who will enjoy this game? Do you like Dungeon Crawling games? Darkest Dungeon was not Hard enough for you? Have you ever felt that video games need to be like real life? One mistake and its over with your save? Well if you are that hardcore this game is definitely for you! [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26335619-Adult-World-Gamers/] I recommend checking the AWG group for more detailed reviews [/url]

This game is tragically hard and not very fun tbh you have about the same odds if not less than the monsters you fight for succeeding and I'm not sure if my RNG is bad but almost every random event I hit was negative. This game seems to be a darkest dungeon type game that is incredibly difficult I could not enjoy it. I'm also not too sure how gold coins work, I know I ran out extremely quick and that's how you buy adventurers.... I didn't see any in game purchases but I'm not sure how else you would get gold coins without beating a mission if it is an in game purchase mechanic though that's extremely wack.

It's not worth it. It's a phone game port, localized with Google translate and with mediocre game play. The idea is good, for sure, but the implementation is bad. On the good side: the game looks super deep, if it had a good localization I'd consider it for my phone. There's a lot of small details that seem fun, from dynamic armor, to intertwined abilities between characters, and dozens of little upgrades to exploit.

I was a kickstarter backer for this game and I was really excited to play it, but I'm sad to say in it's current state, I can't recommend it. I have several major issues with this game. - Tutorial. Very few mechanics are properly explained. There's puzzle encounters in the game and the explanation is borderline useless. I don't know if this is a translation issue/language barrier. There's a few mechanics that aren't explained and make no sense. Randomly when on a quest your heros/characters will have mental status effects, either swinging into the red as "madness" or green as "positivity" but neither are ever explained what they do. There's this enemy that starts chasing you once you are on your way on the quest and it seems to correlate with the "madness" status but since neither mechanics are explained it makes no sense whatsoever and you can't really anticipate nor plan ahead. - Soundtrack. The soundtrack is generic and unmemorable and it doesn't create any kind of tension. - Gameplay flow. There's not a lot of strategy involved in the game. You whittle down the enemy HP bar on a certain body part to trigger an instant kill. Because you're essentially always doing the same thing, it feels more like an auto-battler or idle game rather than a strategic roguelike. On top of that, enemies are capable of depleting a body part health bar with a single attack, leaving your hero crippled and unable to act for the duration of the fight. If another body part gets crippled with the same kind of attack, it's also an instant kill. - One-shot mechanics. Both the boss and the random "mad" enemy that starts chasing you are capable of one-shotting your heros or even entire teams. For comparison, you do like 3-8 damage on a hit, maybe 12-16 if it's a crit, to a single body part. A boss or the enemy that chases you is capable of one-shotting a hero with 20-30 damage to all body parts or even able to one-shot an entire team. There's no way to counter this. - Fleeing. You only get rewards by successfully completing a quest. If you flee halfway you lose all the loot and everything you've gained, essentially forcing you to push towards the boss and either get one-shotted by the boss or to get one-shotted by the mad enemy chasing you. Your heros level very fast and will get several level ups on a single quest but you can only level up their skills once you're safely back in town. The boss you will face at the end is level 10 but even if your heros are level 5-ish by the time you encounter it, they'll still be stuck using Lv. 1 skills until they get safely back in town, which they won't. If your heros die, which they will, you can revive them, but they lose all skills and levels and leveling skills also costs gold, which you essentially lose, thus making it borderline impossible to make any money at all or retain any kind of loot or investment from your "progress". - Dice rolls and RNG. A lot of the random encounters/scripted events in the game seem to have only bad outcomes, every single time. You also need to roll dice in order to move a certain amount of steps, like a board game, except with the "mad" enemy chasing you it's entirely up to the dice rolls whether it catches up to you or not. One moment I got randomly teleported back despite being way ahead of the enemy, and he caught up with me and one-shotted my entire squad without giving me the opportunity to act. I've ranted about the one-shot mechanics a lot, I think one-shot mechanics are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and a terrible way to make your game unnecessarily hard. No one enjoys one-shot mechanics. If your one-shot mechanics are the only way you're capable of making the game challenging, you need to rethink the way you create difficulty. The way this game plays makes me wonder as if it was play-tested at all or if the developers just released it in a rushed state. In it's current state, it's only frustrating, and not enjoyable to play at all. I'm sad to say I regret backing this game as both the artstyle and the premise seem interesting but it doesn't live up to it.

The game simply feels unfinished. There are a small handful of characters to choose from, and it becomes fairly evident which combination works best early on, and from that point the game is basically grind through. I've unlocked all the characters and gotten to the second to last area in just under 10 hours. The game looks promising, but it's just not there.

The number of times I've had a character one-shot is too many at this point, and it is always one sided. I've never one-shot an enemy team except for the 'wait 3 turns casting' abilities. One-shot kills on PCs that you then need to use gold to resurrect, which you only get on successful runs, is bad design unless you're going to hide micro-payments or premium currency in it later, which is still bad design. Since they already tried to add a paid DLC in an early access game it doesn't exactly bode well. Roll a dice to see how many spaces you move? So the only strategy is to pick a lane and hope you land on what you need rather than....actual strategy. You can't use equipment found in the run except in specific lucky encounters, it goes into a bag of loot for the end of the run, so that ring of 'totally saves this run' you just got? Nope, gotta win first. And the invasion/chase mechanic? Remove it or make it opt-in for a run. If I wanted to 'invade' another players run I'd say so, if I want yet another random element to the run I'm currently doing I'd say so. Adding in that the spaces they move is random like yours means there is literally no strategy since they move AFTER you. They've added in a Free Resurrection once per day, as in an actual 24 hours. How about 3 a day so I can actually Resurrect a team I just lost once per day without penalty, or hey just make it free with some sort of XP penalty or anything else than one per day. Nothing quite kills your enthusiasm for a game like starting a run with your best team member and 2 replacements cause you only have one daily free resurrect, only to have your run invaded and a series of bad rolls means the invader fights you and kills one of them. You fight your way to the boss who then one shots your best teammate so you either flee and lose your run progress completely or still lose the run cause your under leveled under geared replacement get killed by the boss that uses a massive club and also shoots you with a pistol in the same attack, whilst their allies throw fireballs. EDIT/Update 19/3/21: The free revive resets your character to level 1 and erases all skill progress/unlocks. So it's not even worth it to do since it just extends the grind since you are now down gold and gems and time. The recovery seems to just refresh Mana/Armour/HP between runs which....just why? Why yet another resource sink with a game where a dead run is already a resource issue. It feels like a game trying to be Darkest Dungeon and Slay the Spire, but where the punishment for RNG and failure is more grind with RNG and failure. The only decent progress I had was with the free DLC reaper character because it's damage ignores Armour, that's it, 1 Character that just breaks it. The Tiredness/Hunger/Souls meter becoming full killing your character is harsh as hell, it already provides a debuff as it gets full, why does it need to be insta-death along with your HP bars? "Hey my Bar is full so I have a massive debuff, I shouldn't do that" VS "My Taunted Unit just killed itself because its fatigue bar went full" is just a bad time. Again, too much that can kill you from just being unlucky. Clearly there are some balance and core gameplay issues at work here. Sadly too late to refund, since it took too long for the overall bad experience to sink in. Don't make the same mistake.