DUNGEONS OF CHAOS

Initially, the game engrossed me with the story and different classes. I felt enjoyment in exploring the land and discovering new locations. The variety of weapons and gear were appealing to me as well. However, by the last chapter the game stumbled notably. It no longer felt polished and committed to a plot. The ending was a jumble of abstract explanations and a boss battle that made no sense. I was disappointed by the ending and it discouraged any further play through.

The first two chapters were okay, but the third one was a total mess. A pile of rushed content with poorly designed scaling of monster strength and a completely counter-intuitive final boss which ruins any and all forms of complete exploration of the game because the boss grows so strong you have to start all over again and just rush through most of the content if you wish to defeat him...good luck wasting time on this once promising project.

Let's get the bad out first: - The UI is awful. This is also on Android, so I imagine it's ported from that. It's not "classic game UI from the 80s / 90s"-bad, it's an entirely new brand of terrible. - All dialogue & text is awkward at best, terrible at worst. It's not just the very frequent typos either, the tone of the game is all over the place - characters using terms like "HOLY BATMAN!" etc. - Combat is, at times, very cumbersome. Enemies respawn very quickly so you need to slog through endless chaff fights that take longer than they should, even on auto. This is partly because the combat area is way too big and melee classes take ages to get into hitting range. But for some strange reason I can't really put into words, I like it. It scratches the same itch that old Might & Magic-games or niche stuff like Nahlakh did. Sometimes the open world nature of it all & the sense of exploration manages to push all the clunky parts aside, and that's where this shines. There's a demo (at leaast on Android) so I'd recommend giving it a go, you'll know if you're part of the target demographic!

This is Ultima 3 as it exists in my memory. Probably much better in reality.

DoC is a party-based, turn-based game. It features a variety of standard classes, a somewhat deep skill system, and a fairly robust set of equipment. Pros: [list] [*] I liked the array of classes to choose from, including the promotion options. The skill system is deep enough to provide a real feeling of customization. [*] The equipment is diverse and has a nice progression throughout the game. [*] The in-game achievements (DoC, not Steam) provide bonuses to the current and all future playthroughs. [*] The existence of auto-battle was nice (though its execution was quite poor). [*] Fast travel options in Ch1 and Ch2 were great (largely removing it for Ch3 however was not appreciated). [*] Wide range of foes. [*] I liked the Arena fights for the most part, but the difficulty was too high for some of these fights. [*] Inventory management was great, which is critical in a game like this for me. [*] It is cheap ($). [/list] YMMV: [list] [*] Graphics are OK. [*] This game had far too much white-space for my tastes. Too much exploration and walking around into areas which had no connecting rooms, loot, or fights. The awesome fast travel options added halfway through Ch2 alleviated this to some degree, but it became a real chore to explore and travel in Ch3. [*] Story was OK. [*] While the skill set was deep, the stats were not. These were limited strictly to Strength and Dexterity. Even after close to 200 hundreds hours in I am still not positive of their effect on all characters. [*] Outside of a handful of encounters, this game is not about tactical turn-based fighting. This was fine for me, as every game obviously doesn't need to the same. However, if you are looking for tactical battlefield fights, look elsewhere. [/list] Cons: [list] [*] Be prepared to go the internet for guides on the skill/stat/level up system. I expect and enjoy doing research for a game like this, but the in-game help and instruction were woefully inadequate. [*] No right click info window. This QoL feature should be mandatory in all games. [*] No travel via click on minimap. This QoL addition is needed. [*] Locks were poorly implemented and basically required close to an hour of keyboard spam outside of battle. At the end, I lowered the difficulty to its lowest setting to make them easier to pick (and then raised it back up afterward) but this tactic left a bad taste in my mouth. [*] Auto-battle was very poorly implemented. First off, please save auto-battle speed so I don't need to adjust it for every fight. Second, there were some skills and spells that couldn't be cast in auto battle. I guess the dev assumes that these spells are limited or are hard to target w/o human direction. What the dev should realize is that I only choose auto-battle when I don't care and want the battle to be over as soon as possible, while using all available skill and spells to raise their level. If need be I can always turn auto off to cast a key spell. [*] The direct damage spells largely seemed weak, aside from lighting and occasionally meteor. While some creatures have weaknesses to some spells, these weaknesses never seemed strong enough to use anything but lightning (ball, chain). [*] The harder fights devolved into 15 min auto-battles. Again, not tactical. And given the limitations of the autobattle system, I had to decide between setting auto-battle and walking away or pausing auto battle every 45 seconds to have a char cast a key skill or spell. Further, the length of these battles highlighted how non-impactful many of the use-limited skills were in the harder fights, as these fights always came to boring slugfests anyway. [*] Battles rarely had more than one type of foe. [/list] Despite my lengthy list of cons, I got a lot of great hours out of this title. I finished one run on Normal. I got half-way through Chapter 3 on Very Hard, but ran out of steam (i.e. the game became a chore to play). However, the fact that I even started a second game should not be discounted and should be viewed as a high compliment. I would auto-buy a sequel to this game (or any similar game from this dev); hopefully such a game would include many QoL improvements. Overall: 7/10

Easy to play, and lots of fun. recommended for lovers of turn based rpgs

[Very First Impression after playing a little] The size of the text in the game is way too large which makes reading unpleasant. Music and Sound lacks passion and talent, so it feels like someone made a prototype for an older ultima style game but it lacks the skill of a story writer. Menus lack tooltips and are very confusing to navigate. Generic sounds are spammed and they lack a consistent style which again makes it feel like a prototype. For my first attempt at the game, it felt like it had a steep learning curve as I had no idea what was going on and had to use Auto-Combat to see what was even possible. Unintuitive is the word I suppose. Lots of depth and no assistance with the learning curve. --------------------------------- [Impression after playing a lot more:] The game is fun in the following areas: 1) exploring of maps to find the next amazing treasure 2) learning how to position your party members and when to use auto-AI (with strategic settings). 3) Levelling up your party members. --------------------------------- The game disappoints me in the following areas: 1) Story: No character arcs. Early on, the story felt bland as the party members have zero input into the story. Later on, the story expands so quickly but alienates the player as to what to do. More guidance for players would be better and perhaps remove the ability to talk to NPCs that are not necessary to the quest as there is nothing worse than constantly walking into guards/farmers etc so they can spam you with the equivalent of "I got five mouths to feed" or "The ghost laughs maniacally at you because the option for Job is there and you got click-baited by the developer into pressing Job". Really annoying stuff that ruins immersion. Better to trim the fat and remove useless interactions. 2) Tedious: Navigation is frustrating as the pathfinding is limited to the screen. This means much of the ugliness of a 4 way direction is forced on the player due to no global waypoint networks for fast travel when you don't want to manually walk through the map. Especially so that players can experiment without being punished by tedious navigation between distant places. 3) Learning Curve: For new players, there are no suggestions for what happens when a party member dies, do you get new ones or do you resurrect your lost ones somewhere? No idea after many hours, instead I just reload. Later on, you learn what happens but it's a mystery when you play for the first time. 4) Visuals: Combat effects are really, really, really limited. For example, if you use a sling, it shows a bolt/arrow. No animations, even though even Ultima 5 had some animations. 5) Sound: lack of diversity or context for Sound effects and music began to get annoying as you invest more time into the game. 6) Too many Re-Load scenarios due to lack of introduction/explanation/hints as to what you are about to get into. Arena fights never change and yet when you reload, you still don't get any information or advice as how to deal with teams of various units. Even if you accept the loss and fight the same team again, the whole team is abbreviated with "A team and then one more" with zero ability to see what the team contains so you can strategize for it. [Auto-Save on map change] can put you in some scenarios where you can no longer avoid death - eg: the Krakken ship with the legion of pirates that insta-kill the player's team. Sometimes death is part of the story but you are never told this and so some parts of the story might never be explored if you reload before you experience the death. And even then, if the map changes and you have auto-save on, your save is now ruined if you didn't want to die. There needs to be an exception for that option where you can select "Don't save if you are attacked by an enemy the instant you load a new map". 7) Gameplay: Chapter 3 has an extreme difficulty increase and even if you set the game to "Very-Easy" the game is waaaaaay too hard and there is no advice on how to restore balance to your party so you don't get killed by every single encounter. I feel this is perhaps "lack of experience" on behalf of the creator. Hopefully they smooth out these jarring moments by adding at least an option for players to get help with hints and suggestions in-game. Sometimes these sudden increases of difficulty feels more like you have to reverse engineer an alien spaceship rather than play a game. Too many "What the...? Why...? I don't understand" moments. Another example is that often quest givers will say something simple like "you will find X in the mountains to the west" so you go to the west part of the mountains and the location is locked off. You go to more all the mountains in the west and there is nothing there. Truly chapter 3 is some of the worst game design I've seen but Chapters 1 and 2 are ok. Opinion of the game: I am critical but we all should be critical of things we purchase - else innovation will suffer. Despite being critical I do enjoy the game very much. I think it is a good game and I do recommend it if you have lots of time to spend, immersed in this game which reminds me of other games in some aspects - such as: Diablo-Simplicity for Quests and story. Ultima 5 map and level navigation. Warlords (1990) graphics style. The value for money is well worth it and I respect the producer for being fair. If you ever enjoyed Ultima 5, Warlords or Heroes of Might and Magic; I think you will enjoy this game.

I like it, it has fun character builds and excellent game play; it is the game I was looking for and have yet to see one like it in recent times.