This is a game I didn’t know I wanted until it was already out and was really excited by the chance to
play and give my thoughts on it. Dungeon of the Endless is called a “…Rogue-Like Dungeon-Defense
game …” by its creators and I believe they got it right with perma-death, resource management, some
light RPG elements, and procedurally generated levels. Man it’s a good year for dungeon crawler fans!
I need to get this off my chest before I really get into it so bare with me. Right off the bat the first thing
that got my attention was the soundtrack which really set the tone for the game giving it a mystic and
ominous feeling. I mean listen to the main theme and tell me you don’t want to go dungeon exploring.
The soundtrack for this game will definitely be one of my favorites, maybe even beating out Bastion. I
love every track.

Now that that’s out of the way lets talk about some of the mechanics of the game starting with the
combat. What I thought would be a hack ‘n’ slash turned out to be a very passive experience. You’re
only able to control which room your heroes are in, as well as being able to choose when to heal, and
when to use their special abilities. This leaves the actual fighting to them and the automated turrets.
However, this doesn’t make the combat as boring as you’d think since you need to strategically place
your team in certain chokepoints to protect your resource nodes as well as the crystal that will cause
an auto failure if destroyed. As a side note, from what I can tell there is no way to prioritize who your
heroes attack which can be frustrating at times, but all in all I don’t mind the combat.

Other interesting tidbits that I would like to quickly mention would be what I call the “room mechanic”,
where in order to gain more resources after you place your nodes you must enter a new room and fight
any monsters that may be lurking behind those metal doors. To top that off, if you don’t have power to
other rooms the monsters will spawn from those as well so make sure you prepare for the onslaught
that is bound to come. If you’re looking for more of a challenge simply complete the first set of levels
and more escape pods will open up, giving buffs and debuffs to make your next play-through all the
more interesting. The game’s harder difficulty settings give a lot of replay value as well.

Now with the story I have a bit more of a problem. Granted I didn’t come into this expecting some
amazing saga, but I’ve found more information about what’s going on in this game from their steam
webpage than what the game has given me from the ten or so hours that I’ve played. The dialog
between the heroes during the breaks between levels and the background info given through
unlockables is nice, but it isn’t much so don’t look to this game for story. That all said, I do give them
credit with the dialog and flavor text that they do have. It has a humor to it that I did not expect and
is rather refreshing given the nature of this game a good example would be when choosing your first
escape pod it says “The pod is guaranteed to survive any crash; we hope Its occupants do as well.” This
helps lighten the mood for when you restart for the eighth time so I give them some points there.

To sum it up what you have is a Dungeon crawler with random generated levels, multiplayer that gives
a lot of replay value, and some serious difficulty even on “easy” mode to keep the pressure on. Add to
that some minor RPG elements like leveling and loot collecting and you got a good game that’s definitely
worth the price.