Fine as a base, but needs more, and some touch ups as is.
If you like Dungeon Builders and want something to scratch that itch until perfect game comes along? Not a bad pick up.
The game is fun, and if you get to threat 7 you can probably get a dozen or so hours out of it.
Placing various rooms, and rearranging them is enjoyable. The flow, and loop makes sense.
I want to say it has some good groundwork but in some areas it still feels like its in Beta. For example you can unlock clans, and classes. Do you want to know what those are, or look at the skill tree, or troops? Pick em. There's no index to look at that. Want to know about the named enemies, or even the rank and file? Nothing there.
Traps seem curiously absent, and the closest you get is a spell to cast on the enemy spawn point.
Xp isn't shared throughout your dungeon, which means if you have a unit that does 90% of a untis health and another one gets the final hit your first guy gets nothing for it.
While placing various rooms is fun, most of them are the same kinda deal. They have more, or less spots, but they're some sort of square or rectangle. No circles, or other shapes.
Enemy ai outside of a challenge mode functions the same way every time. They go in, and explore the dungeon in a clockwise way. That's it. This means you build a huge maze if you want to sprawl to the right, and a single room over you put a tiny room with your dungeon heart on it , and you're golden for the most part.
Enemy types are soldier, soldier with shield (paladins don't heal etc), mage, and rogue along with final boss, and boss versions of the soldier, and mage.
The rogue is the only one you really need to change up for as stealth is just a skip encounter freebie. The secret is to rearrange your dungeon when you see one is coming, and toss low levels there to eat the stealth so it pops out in front of your big guys.
On a + side there are things you can add like kitchens that modify your monsters. They'll change the attack, health and also let them cook food when you kill enemies which in turn feeds your armies. Useful for beasts, but less so for undead who don't really eat. Your little monsters will also get cute chef hats in that room.
There are other rooms that serve the same purpose, altars, mana rooms, and gold blocks where you plop down low level monsters hopefully out of the way of enemies and let them do their thing. It's up to you to pick which ones you need and cal do without. Some like the library, give you a diploma cap, and lots of xp, but at the cost of reducing your monsters health greatly so letting a hero into that room usually leads to a slaughter of most of the students.
To level up your monsters you do the 3 merge game. This is fine, serviceable. It does not however take into account separate stats when you do so. For example a spider dropped onto a spider will always have the same attack as a result no matter if you had that spider hitting the gym the entire run so something to be aware of.
Artifacts on your monsters will combine unless their pockets would be full in which case you lose what the one you dropped had.
There's no confirmation for merging so if you're moving around monsters you can sometimes accidentally merge them so be careful on that.
As an aside each clan also only has 3 units. For example undead are skeletons, ghosts, and wraiths. Each of those has a few different forms, but they're the same still. For example skeletons turn into bigger skeletons, and then into 'skeleton lords' which stays the same no matter how high a level you get.
Other than for fun higher levels of threat (ascensions basically) do not increase infamy. You get the same 800 for playing on 0 that you do for beating the hero twins at 7. The only way to increase this is a challenge run where you can selected a few options to add a few hundred infamy.
The most expensive unlock is 2k so it's not the end of the world, but it does highlight how little there is to the tree.
Most of your evil tree unlocks new classes, more health for your dungeon heart, more gold at the start, or clans. Some of the classes have great synergy, plague doctor, and the other healing classes if you get lucky with items and rooms can give you some truly powerful guys.
Most clans can beat the initial few difficulties fine, but a few struggle at higher ascensions. I would probably never pick Elemental over my venom stacking boys. That could be a personal thing, but they just didn't seem to scale as well as double stacking poison.
It could use something for extra infamy at the end. It's a single player game so balance is less important once you've basically cleared everything. Once every upgrade is purchased let us dump infamy into clans, or stats at some increase to let us improve their base stats or something. Maybe even just a separate tree where we can pick a clan, and upgrade aspects of that clan (ie if you pick undead you can spend infamy to make deathrattle trigger twice, or improve deathrattle etc)
The game seems to lag after it's been open for around an hour or two. You can close, and reopen it but it's worth noting.
The screen where you select areas to corrupt is again serviceable, but very very bare bones, and looks like a placeholder. To it's credit it does work it just looks...not great. You'd get the same effect just picking something from a list. Considering it's where you get great items, skill points it seems like it should look a bit better.
I would still recommend it because it's hard to find a good dungeon builder, but be aware of what you're buying, and its shortcomings. Hopefully it'll get more updates, to patch up the game, and expand on it.
