It’d got to the point where there was about a fifty-fifty chance that I’d be able to beat the first boss. Case in point: ranged weapons are so so so much better than melee weapons that it’s absurd.
I think this game is really quite unbalanced. You know what? I think I know what it is. Is there something I’m not getting? What am I missing? Have I always been shit at games? Or does this game just have an exceptionally dedicated fanbase? But then – maybe it’s just me! There are achievements for beating each boss, and looking at those stats, people do not seem to be struggling as much as me. You should also note, since you’re so used to my balanced and spectacularly well-informed opinions, that I have not finished this game. It took me quite some time to realise that these stat boosts will remain with you for the rest of your run, and so eating food is absolutely key to powering up your little dude! And then on each floor there’s an altar, which I’d given up interacting with because its purpose seemed so ambiguous, and so I didn’t realise I could actually start using it since I’d rescued a specific character. When you eat, you have a satiety meter that fills up and only reduces as you enter unexplored rooms, so you can only eat every now and then. For example, on each floor there is a single restaurant that sells food with health and stat-boosting properties. Other things aren’t really explained at all, which probably only adds to my concerns that I’m not ‘getting it’. The game appears to have been developed by a small team of Korean developers and as such, there are some very quirky translations (there’s a boomerang whose description reads, “A boomerang comes back, but love doesn’t.”). And then you go and stand on the soft ground beneath which the randomly-shifting dungeon lies, and it rises up and swallows you in its giant maw (DunGREED, see!?) and off you go again. After you’ve found each one you can pay to permanently construct them each a building (a training area, armour shop, blacksmith, etc.) where you can do things like level up, or buy equipment for your next run. Whenever you die you are resurrected at the surface with some of the money you collected (the dungeon eats the rest, along with your equipment), where any villagers you have rescued in the dungeon hang around. I don’t know how many, because apparently I’m not very good at it. And after each level there’s a boss, and there’s just a big ol’ linear set of levels and bosses to bash your way through. It’s a stat-heavy game you need to boost your strengths and look for synergies. If you aren’t carrying a two-handed weapon then you can pop a little stat-boosting something in your off hand (like a shield or dagger), and you can equip any four pieces of armour. There are melee weapons like swords and spears, and there are ranged weapons like bows and guns. You can jump and dash and hit things with one of your two equipped sets of weapons.
The game it has the most in common with of the ones I’ve played is Rogue Legacy, in that you battle through a procedurally-assembled side-on dungeon consisting of hand-designed screens filled with a random assortment of baddies. Do you ever get that feeling, when you come out of the cinema, and you’ve just seen a film that that’s well shot, decently acted and competently made but you just feel like you’re not getting something? Like, all you need to realise is that the whole plot is a metaphor for the colonisation of the planet or international diplomacy and you’ll be like, “ aaaaah I understand now!” and it all slots into place and now you can love it, but it never happens and you just feel like you’ll never appreciate it? Well, that’s a long-winded and largely irrelevant way of describing how I feel about Dungreed.įirst things first: it’s another roguelite.
I don’t think it’s crap I’ve just played it way more than I want to because people seem to like it, and I feel like there’s something I’m missing. This is the first game I’ve written about here on Napalm Industries that I’m really not into.