Monsters' Den Chronicles

I have played the Monsters' Den games on another site and then again here. I can say for sure that this is the weakerst title in the franchise, although it has better graphics then the previous 2. Note: the original Monsters Den is not present on Steam, you can play it elsewhere for free. Why I think so? Because for some reason it's way harder then the other ones ( I'm talking about standard and above difficulties ). MD: Chronicles is one of those titles that gives you a lot to chose: classes, skills, attributes etc.....but there are clearly some choices that are way better/stronger then others. It is critical to chose the right combination of the aforementioned prerogatives or the gameplay will be very hard to the point of being stuck. So in essence, this title seems made for the fanatics of this franchise, who know exactly the right combos. ( A banal example: I didn't chose the Rogue, and later I read in the guides that it's the best damage dealer in the game, because of his critical hits that make all fights way easier and shorter). Luckily, there is a way around the difficulty spikes, and that is - grinding. There are 4 dungeons ( each with 3 to 5 floors ) and 2 endless dungeos for building high scores. Grinding is not for the experience, because the enemies scale with your levels, but for money. With money you buy better items. But keep in mind that the emporium(the market) has 5 parts and each part have 5 levels to unlock and that requires a lot of money and grinding. So, I manged to beat all campains with a lot of re-playing some dungeons and it was more frustrating then entertaining and always on the edge of being stuck. Basically, for people who never played the Monsters' Den games and are thinking of trying them out - I recommend all the other titles except this one.

Though it upgrades most of the mechanics and allows for plenty of customization, it gets boring almost right away with the new combat system, which in theory looks like a good way to enrich the gameplay, but in fact it makes it more plain, as now half of the stats don't matter. Fights become longer, but only because dmg scaling is down, there are way more ways to buff/debuff everyone along with the tile effects, and it's less about just fighting the enemy New backpack and emporium are cool and more readable feature, tho looting while using mouse only is just painful

4/10 this game had its time and place, not today. - gameplay hasnt aged well +6$

[h1][b]A game with simple and repetitive mechanics[/b][/h1] [b]What this game is:[/b] This Dungeon Crawler has simple mechanics which are solid, but repetitive. You have to constitue a party to end some evil located in a randomly generated dungeon. Nothing special to write home about as there is almost no story at all. [b]How does it perform:[/b] It works well enough, and there is only one annoying bug I can write about. There are six potential campaigns to play in it, two of which are limitless (in one case you have to survive ennemy waves until either you retire or you die). You progress over the scenarios, unlocking some functionalities in the ingame store. The story is really a barebone thing that is totally uninteresting and uninspiring. Gameplay is simple and solid, but without a meaningful story, everything becomes old very, very fast. The ingame store will allow you to buy some useful things (and sell stuff you find in the dungeon). [b]The good points:[/b]this game is for times when you do not want to play something complicated or demanding. You can save and quit whenever you find it expedient (except the campaign where waves of ennemies come at you endlessly). The mechanics are solid but unsophisticated. It takes less than 100 MB of space on your HD and can be played by a 10 years old PC. All achievements are working and can be obtained through playing normally. [b]The bad points:[/b] the storyline is so thin it looks like the clothing of a nudist at home. There is one annoying bug when you try to visualize the discovered areas of the dungeon by moving the view with the arrows: the game will sometimes suddenly move the view elsewhere on the map, and you will have to move around to find the spot where you were back before. Achievements are needlessly grindy, and will force anyone looking to complete them to play well beyond the time any fun can be had... Some achievements are heavily random dependent: if you are unlucky it could take a LOT of gameplay before you are able to get, say, all the items necessary to constitute a full set of a given type of armour. The ingame store becomes very quickly useless because very soon you find better gear in the dungeon, this aspect of the game is not well balanced. [b]Conclusion:[/b]I cannot recommend this game for the price that is asked for it. I own two other games from the same developer and I must say I really did not like the first one, [b]Monsters' Den: the Book of Dread[/b]. This one is slightly better, some effort has been made to provide some barebone storyline, but it becomes very repetitive very quickly. I own the third of the series, [b]Monsters' Den: Godfall[/b], but I have not played it yet. It seems it might be better, but I'll know in time when I get there. For now I would suggest that if you are really interested in this game, buy it when it is seriously discounted. Otherwise, do not bother.

Es más de los mismo, pero con unos gráficos para navegar por el mapa ahora isométricos. Los combates, en niveles un poco avanzados se vuelven más difíciles, y si bien la primera parte del Monster´s Den era asequible, en el Monsters' Den: Book of Dread, esta segunda parte a crecido en dificultad, aunque sigue siendo un buen juego, es más difícil. Los gráficos como digo han mejorado un poco en el mapa, y ahora en la batalla vemos las figuras de cuerpo entero y no solo una representación en una cuadrado de los avatares, ahora está mucho mejor, eso sí. El juego como os digo es más de los mismo que nos ofrecía la primera parte, el inventario ha variado un poco, pero viene siendo todo el mismo esquema, ir avanzando por pasillos y estancias, matando grupos de enemigos y usando altares para curarnos y buscando las escaleras para dirigirnos al siguiente nivel. Sigue en la linea, mejores gráficos, y mismo desarrollo, en global a mejorado. Un saludo!

[b]TL; DR[/b] It is basically 1:1 the previous game but with better atmosphere, graphics, and dungeons. It has simple systems but with its procedurally generated dungeons you could play it forever, provided that you like niche games with a lot of combat and enjoy comparing loot. [h1] Story [/h1] So you enter the Monster’s Den… Chronicles… Could you imagine that a Dungeon Crawler and web-game is light on story? However, [i]Monster’s Den: Chronicle[/i] is a chronicle, right? So, there is a lot more story than in the preceding games. You are the commander of a company of adventurers, and you take on six separate scenarios each with their own stories, and objectives. Uncover the machinations of a cult, preserve the sanctity of a tomb, or play the decoy as the rest of your company escape an ambush! They are simple but fun premises, after all it is a dungeon crawler, so it is fine if the plot is an excuse to visit a dungeon. With that said you do not get much of a narrative, a few paragraphs to introduce a quest, two as you progress, and one to close it. However, it is worth mentioning that the text is pretty good, generally better than I had expected, it gives you some creepy atmosphere, lore, as well as your objective for the floor in a few short lines, and that is pretty good. [h1] Presentation [/h1] The biggest change that [i]Monster’s Den: Chronicles[/i] brought with it was the visuals, they have received a complete overhaul. Now you get a lot of spritework which really brings all the different enemies to life, the same can be said for your characters as they also feel a lot more lifelike, and you can still import your own heroes although it requires more work than when it was simply a portrait. The drawback for all these sprites is that we get fewer factions than in [i]Book of Dread[/i], we only get three of them but that is fine since they are so competently made and even include a few imaginative designs. As for the music, it is less impressive, it is fine do not get me wrong, but it is the same soundtrack as in [i]Book of Dread[/i]. There might be a few new tracks, but I was not inclined to look too deeply into it since I think that the feeling that it is the exact same OST illustrates my problem with it. So, there is mainly combat music, and a boss track, it grows repetitive just playing [i]Chronicles[/i] but if you have already played the previous game than it might be boring from the get-go. Consider having something else on. [h1] Gameplay [/h1] [i]Monster’s Den: Chronicles[/i] is about clearing dungeons, fighting and looting. To aid you, you have your company, a group of adventurers with various classes and specialisations, you are free to select up to four of them each time you embark on a quest. You have the more standard dungeon delves, the first three focuses on one faction each, but you also get a few other campaigns, a survival mode, a labyrinth that mixes all enemy types as well as an endless pit that can never be cleared. Naturally you will pick up a lot of treasures, sometimes from the dead, others from chests, and at points as rewards for a job well done. Some loot might be better suited for a Cleric specialising in offense while another piece might be better for a healer, so whenever you pick something up you will need to consider whether to save your treasures or sell it and buy something that has immediately benefits to your party. However, the loot is generally less exciting and less ridiculously overpowered than in [i]Book of Dread[/i], that is good for balance but limits the amount of dumb fun you can have. [h2] Combat[/h2] So, combat is most of what you do, and it is almost unchanged from [i]Book of Dread[/i], in my opinion [i]Chronicles[/i] is more engaging due to its more involved visuals and effects, however, it does still feel simple, and (in longer sessions) repetitive. It works great when you play a dungeon at a time or so but once you start getting to stronger enemies it typically gets less and less interesting, you do not see more foes, you do not see new loot, and all that changes is bigger numbers. I suppose that is fine for an endless dungeon crawl. Like most other dungeon crawlers, [i]Chronicles[/i] has front and back ranks where melee can only hit adjacent enemies, and you have limited options for changing your positioning in the middle of a fight. You will need to contend with your enemies positioning, so that you can prioritise their most dangerous monsters, but you also need to consider your own passives, such as placing a Cleric with a healing aura in a central location. Not only that but you also have terrain effects, so you will find yourself moving your adventurers at the start of each fight so as to maximise your advantage, and minimise your disadvantage, this was a great change and adds a small layer of complexity. As for encounters… I am torn between two extremes, two opposing opinions. I seem to simultaneously think that all enemies feel roughly identical and that all enemies have some unique flavour. Strictly speaking, both are true, everyone has their own spells and skills to use, some can buff, some can summon, and some can terrify you, but at the same time they feel very similar to fight cause combat often devolves into a melee where they are throwing themselves at you and you at them. As a result, you often use the same tactic every single fight, prioritising summoners, Fearsowers and creatures with stun, this dichotomy makes for a surprisingly fun system.

if you want to (for some reason) play a game in this series, literally any of them are better than this one

꽤 재밌는 던전크롤러 단점은 한글화가 안됐다는 점인데 스토리는 그냥 뻔한 내용들이고 게임 자체가 꽤 재밌는편 아이템 아이콘이 너무 작은데다가 한번에 드래그이동을 못한다는게 거지같긴 함

How this game works is, you choose a party of 4 characters, each of which has a level, a class, and a subclass, and you enter a dungeon. They level up after winning battles, and they keep their levels between dungeons. You can also equip your characters with items you discover and besides their equipment slots you have an inventory that also persists between dungeons. In the dungeons you go around the map discovering new rooms. Some rooms will have gold or treasure or special useful effects. Some will have monsters that you need to defeat (or use an item to sneak past) before you can progress. You need to complete all of the objectives for a floor and find the exit before you can advance to the next one, and each dungeon usually has 3 floors. My biggest complaint is, there's not enough inventory space. For a game where a big draw is all the different pieces of equipment, you can't store much of it. Sure, you get 5 bags with 100 slots each. But that's surprisingly not much. There are 10 different subclasses total and they have 10 equipment slots, so if you want to store a full set for each of them then that's already 100 slots you need. And there's different special properties that you might like to experiment with, and the game specifically has a bunch of unique epic items and a bunch of different item sets that you might want to keep a full set of, and you'll want to keep a bunch of consumables. So you can fill up your bags pretty quickly. There's also limited options for sorting and filtering your equipment. It's nice that there's any, but if you're looking for specific bonuses, then you'll have to mouseover each piece of usable equipment to check. This can make equipping and going through your equipment to see what's useful and what you can sell a bit tedious. What I ended up doing was having 3 bags for equipment and 2 for consumables. Of the equipment bags I have them separated by type. One is for all weapons and misc items excluding the ones that go in the third bag. One is for head, shoulders, and torso armor. The last one is for hands, legs, feet, rings, and later on I added cloaks too. The auto-loot system doesn't distinguish beyond the type of item, so I have to put items into the last bag manually. As for strategy, there's a few options. You can have a tank, although I was never able to find a reliable way to force the enemies to target them. I tried using the Shield Wall skill, but it's expensive and one of the bosses drained my mana so I couldn't figure out a way to make them target a tank and I just had to restart that whole dungeon. There's the "enemy attention" stat, which I don't know how that works. I'm guessing that you need to get that up to 100 before enemies will always target a certain character. You can also just go full offense and kill all the enemies before they can kill you. This works pretty well for the earlier dungeons. The game gives you less rewards if the enemies hit you at least once in a battle anyway, so I prefer using this strategy to tanking when I can. The third strategy I've found is to use Time Warp. This is a Conjurer ability which completely resets the action clock of each character. It does also leave a status effect which prevents you from casting Time Warp again for a while, but if you combine it with another Sorcerer ability called Animate Shadow then you can have the Sorcerer and that shadow alternately casting Time Warp and the enemy never gets to take a turn. You just need to make sure that the Sorcerer is faster (has higher quickness) than all the enemies and all the other character that you want to take actions are faster than the Sorcerer. This strategy is fairly tedious because you need to spend a bunch of turns using Time Warp, and probably a bunch casting Quickness with your Ranger too to keep everyone fast enough. However, you can use it to cheese out wins on even the strongest bosses in the game no matter your level. Outside of combat, the acts each have an interesting story, and the epic item descriptions give some lore about the game's world. Act 5 appears to be glitched in this version, since it didn't show the text that normally shows upon reaching a new floor. I'm currently in the late game and trying to collect all the epic items and get the epic item set achievement. Playing the game is becoming a bit of a chore. Your characters level up automatically and the enemies automatically scale to your level so you need to keep replacing your equipment to defeat the enemies in a reasonable period of time. I find this kind of tedious, especially since as previously mentioned there are limited options for item sorting so I have to go through them all manually. I'm using the Time Warp strategy, since that's the only thing I've tried that reliably defeats all enemies, especially if your equipment is a bit outdated. I also buy Scrolls of Decption from the Emporium (using low level characters so I can restock for the lowest possible price). I use these to skip nonessential fights and I get enough gold that the Scrolls pay for themselves. There is one thing in the game that can let you skip this process, and that is Sparks of Legend, which make a piece of equipment automatically scale to your character's level. However, these are extremely rare and difficult to farm for unless you already have a party that can kill lots of enemies quickly. I have only gotten one of these which I luckily got from a shrine early on. I remember playing a version of this game where if you bought the premium content you automatically got 5 Sparks of Legend. I wish you got those 5 Sparks of Legend in this version. I'll probably try a trick I read about where if you use character reset to get level 1 characters and Spirit Guides to give them high level equipment, then fights and farming become really easy. So in conclusion, I enjoyed this game, though I found it tedious at some points. I liked the story and the lore, and collecting all the different items for different builds. EDIT: Well, I tried the endless dungeon, and wow, this makes farming way easier. I was doing it the hard way before. The endless dungeon has no special requirements to complete a floor besides get to the exit. So you can just use an Architect's Plan on each floor, Scroll of Revelations and/or Skeleton Key as needed, and Scroll of Deception to get past all the encounters. This gets you tons of gold, and you can also farm for Sparks of Legend at the same time. Plus the Emporium sells Apex Forge from special orders at renown 1000, and with all the gold you get you can afford to upgrade all the equipment you want.

I like the game a lot!!!!