By: Michel Carrier-Auger
Dungeon of the Endless MSRP:13$ Platforms: PC and Mac Genre: Rouge-like, tower defense, dungeon crawler Developer: Amplitude Studios
Dungeon of the Endless is a weird mix of a bunch of game genres that somehow work together to produce a fun, nerve-wracking experience.The story begins by launching players into a scene where a ship has been a attacked by pirates so players have to select crew members and an escape pod to crash on the surface of a nearby planet. Gamers then have to get to the surface of the planet and thus begins the game.
The basic mechanic of Dungeon of the Endless is that you have to protect your crystal, the device that powers all of your rooms and If your crystal is destroyed, you lose. Now, you also have heroes, or player-controlled characters.
The goal of the game is to reach the 15th floor, but you have to find the exit in the 15 randomly-generated floors beforehand. Between you and that exit are a lot of monsters that thirst for your hero’s blood. To get to the exit, you have to open a bunch of doors.
Every time you open a door, a turn cycles, so anything that you are researching will progress and you will get more resources, or FIDS, that are carried over from Amplitude Studios previous game, Endless Space. You use food to heal your heroes and level them up, you use industry to build modules in your powered rooms, dust is used to power your rooms and science to research new modules to build. Every time you open a door for a room, there might be a random event in which some dust or monsters might spawn. Dust is used to power your rooms. For every 10 dust you earn, you can power one room, as shown above. Since I have 35 dust, I can power 3 rooms. The game play is fun, as most of the game is spent making preparations for incoming monster waves and protecting the modules you have built. Monster waves can also easily swap from something that you can handle and that is easy to clear, to disaster management. While everything is going wrong, the game becomes complicated as you abuse the pause system to heal your heroes and activate their abilities to give them bonuses. The modules that you can research using science in the game vary from enhanced generators of industry to different turrets or defensive modules.
The game also has a really good sense of humor, as it cracks jokes the entire time. The misfit groups of prisoners that you can select also have humorous personalities that make the game feel like a parody movie of dungeon crawler games.
I give Dungeon of the Endless 7.5 arbitrary points out of ten.
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