Dungeon Rushers Review

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Dungeon Rushers is the first title from Goblinz Studio, is the classic style RPG dungeon crawler with turn based tactical combat. As a brief summary of the game as a whole, players can choose their squad of five characters from a total pool of ten, all of which have their own skills and talent trees. Each character also has their own equipment and stats to manage, which players can collect resources to craft armour and weapons. Dungeon Rushers over sixty unique dungeons all with two modes of difficulty, normal and heroic.

Visually almost every aspect of Dungeon Rushers is polished, from the character pixel art, background and UI design. Each character stands out with a unique character design, while remaining somewhat to fantasy tropes. (Dwarves, rangers, orcs ect.) The same can be said for the enemy variety, but I don’t want it to come across as a complaint as the pixel art is some of the best I’ve seen from indie titles in a while.

There certainly is a lot of content within Dungeon Rushers, there is a whole world map to slowly progress through all the levels plus all the multiplayer options. Dungeon Rushers also offers players the ability to create their own dungeons for other online players to combat, meaning if you and a few friends enjoyed the game content could be endless. The dungeon designer is incredibly easy to use as the dungeons work on a tile based system, you simply add encounters or traps onto the tiles you choose.

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The gameplay cycle for Dungeon Rushers is something that I personally feel gets incredibly repetitive. You enter each dungeon with the objective of finding the treasure and you progress through tile by tile, bumping into enemies or traps. Each level has three challenges to complete, but once you find the treasure you’re free to leave. The majority of levels play out like this and within the first half an hour, I found myself finding it a little tedious.

There are two main ways of gathering resources, either from inside a dungeon or buying from the shop. The shop has only a set amount of items which change each visit, so you can’t always rely on buying what you require. The crafting system is also rather well fleshed out, each item is in certain sets with their own level. The more of one item type you craft, you gain more experience which in turn unlocks better items and so on.

I also discovered something of a curious use of random elements, coming in two main forms; blessings/curses and battle effects. Additional treasure is scattered around the map which will have random effects to your party of heroes, such as replenishing health/mana but can also curse/poison in the same manner. It is completely random, so each time you do it will have a different outcome but I honestly felt like I was being beaten with the unlucky stick. You are taking a risk by collecting them but it would make some runs impossible from just being punished, it made me never want to take them out of a multitude of bad experiences.

Now, the battle effects side of things really frustrated me, well one in particular fog. Fog makes it so you have a chance to miss your attacks, but enemies however still hit as intended. It just wasn’t enjoyable in any way, I understand how it is intended to make fights more challenging but it simply made them frustrating especially when the enemies aren’t effected at all.

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This also leads into why I found the first few hours of the game to have such a steep difficulty curve, mostly related to the random effects. Around the point of having a three man party, the encounters against the healing/reviving skeletons just whittled down my team and with health potions not dropping frequently enough I was stuck in a repeating cycle. Dungeon Rushers surprisingly doesn’t have any sort of reviving item, so once you lose a character they’re dead until you restart. I’ve seen that multiple comments on the Steam page also highlight the need for grinding experience to progress, so it seems Dungeon Rushers does have a small issue with difficulty.

Overall, Dungeon Rushers is a charming little title. The interaction between characters has funny moments and it is intentionally a game that doesn’t take itself so serious, the Dwarf character is an accountant of all things. There were a good few lines that brought a smile to my face. The game reminisces in RPG titles of old, while being a rather simple game with a significant amount of replicability. Personally, Dungeon Rushers isn’t the type of title I typically enjoy but I found elements fun but I can see this title fitting more comfortably into the mobile market.

The design gripes that I have are honestly issues that I personally found with the game, however I can see the appeal of Dungeon Rushers and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the tactical RPG genre. The game is available now on Steam and the developers seem to be updating it rather regularly, which could lead to additional content.

Rating 6

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.

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