Let me start out by saying that this is conceptually a fantastic game simply based on its unique take on dungeon crawling and its character progression system. The early stages of this game were more fun than i've had in a while on other games. I think that the developer is on to something pretty special, which could result in a game that is exceptional. Did this game take advantage of the unique progression mechanics to make the most of this? The answer is sadly no... Let me unpack this for you.
You start out as the inheritor of a run down shop that was gifted to you by your grandma, who despite having passed on, strangely seems to leave messages for you from time to time. Your aim is to become a wealthy and productive merchant, resulting in your little run down shop being upgraded from time to time as you earn more money. You earn more money by doing dungeon runs, which become progressivly harder, ther deeper you go to collect items from enemies and bosses, and by looting chests and challenge areas.
You pick up weapons and armour from time to time, and learn crafting recipes to create weapons, armour, and various shop related items that improve your shop comfort level and prestige, thereby increasing how much money you earn, and the number of customers you get. The huge bonus is that items that you create and add as decorations and furniture to your shop give you passive bonuses for your runs, ie weight carrying capacity, attack speed, attack damage, magic damage, health, mana, movement speed, etc. This is to me the most special thing about this game. Stat bonuses don't rely overly heavily on items you equip, but instead the decorations and furniture in your shop. This is something that kept me coming back for just one more run, in order to find that new special item or recipe. or to upgrade a particular stat of mine that was lacking. I cannot stress how fun and addictive this was to do, at least for a while... And this is where i come to the downsides of this game.
There is a point in this game, where you just hit an end game wall which you feel almost immediately (for me this happened about 10 hours in), and this happens well before the last boss fight. You have the expensive upgraded shop and you don't need money anymore to buy the next one, meaning you have no need to sell any more items to customers. By reason of this there's no incentive to complete dungeon runs anymore except to find further furniture and decoration items and recipes, or to find the components to complete recipes that you already have. At this point though, the only purpose of this is to get all the steam achievements.
Combat is a cheese. Enemies are unbelievably easy to fight and kill once you understand their mechanics, and with the addition of health and mana potions, there is no real challenge to be had. Even the boss fights are unbelievably easy, and this all comes down to one thing, which is the ridiculously overpowered nature of magic. All magic damage weapons do very high AOE damage at low mana cost. So basically you walk into a room and click a couple of times and voila, everything is dead. The bosses are so easy to cheese from a distance, and the final boss died to my relentless spamming in about 8 seconds. There is nothing challenging about this game, and after dying early on in the game once learning the ropes, i never even came close to dying again.
Areas are bland and boring, and after a few runs it gets pretty old. Given also that there are only 15 dungeon levels to explore and 3 dungeon bosses, it feels very lackluster once you reach the end of these levels. At this point, I asked myself 'Is this it?' It all feels very rushed and incomplete, and in my view this game should have remained in EA for far longer to be polished and expanded upon.
Traps are easy and not a challenge, and the addition of the buff statues at the end of each level makes the game so easy that there is no fear or risk of dying and losing all of your gear. Clearly there was not enough time taken to address balancing issues in this game, which must be addressed to improve it.
And now rather than continuing to belittle this game, i want to once again remind anyone reading this post that the game has AMAZING potential if the following issues are addressed...
- Get rid of the statues. With the buffs that you get from shop decorations, the statues are not needed at all. This would also make the game more challenging, which is aboslutely necessary if you want players to feel the weight of 'risking it all for just one more level in the dungeon'
- Make shop upgrades way more expensive and lower the bonuses of prestige. This would slow down the rate of progression in the game so that you don't end up a millionaire with nothing to do before you reach the final boss. Alternatively, make some shops that are even bigger so that money still is useful by the end of the game
- There is so much room to expand in this game, and you could link the existing area to new dungeon and open area maps that present a far bigger challenge. Perhaps future rewards for beating these areas could be taking over a hill fort that you progressively upgrade to a castle. Such a large scale structure would have so many upgrades needed, that grinding for more money would be a rewarding venture for a very long time indeed. I think that would be an amazing idea. It would also give you huge creativity to add new and unique creature types to the game like trolls, dragons, beholders, and other DnD type enemies
- Nerf the heck out of magic, or create different types of magic weapons such as higher damage single target strike staves and lower damage AOE staves or magic spells that bind enemies, freeze them or perform other functions such as summoning enemies. Another good idea to limit the cheesy nature of magic is to make mana non rechargable to prevent spamming, and to limit the number of mana potions you can bring into dungeons. This would also force players to make hard choices about where they use their magic skills, and force them into the more dangerous position of using melee attacks against enemies. It would also make mana pool upgrades in the shop far more beneficial and desirable, since mana pool increases would translate directly to how much magic can be used on a run. It would also make mana potions way more useful and nceessary.
- Make the dungeon 25+ levels instead of 15, and reduce the drop rate of uncommon, rare, epic and legendary items and components substantially to once again make dungeon runs more dangerous and risky, and to increase the lifespan of the game. Normally i don't like to grind in games, but in this instance when danger and risk is linked to how many items you can collect on a run, I think it would be a wise choice to implement. Lowering drop rates for the rarer recipes would also be a good choice, and it might be wise to have only 1 boss chest instead of 2 to make coming back for boss runs more worthwhile.
- Make enemies harder and more varied. Perhaps in each level, you could make variants of enemies (elites, etc) to make runs more risky and challenging. It wouldn't be hard to do either, because a change in colour palette and stat changes for elite vairants would be quick and easy. Perhaps these elite variants might be the only enemy types that drop particular items, making fighting them not only hard, but also necessary.
Anyway, i really do hope that the developer(s) take this review not as a trashing of their game, but as constructive feedback on what i believe could be something truly special in the future.
