Deep Dungeons of Doom: Review
The game boils down to about three possible actions, but those actions must be perfectly timed, and any misjudgments can ruin a level. If that sounds painful to you, it’s because it can be. But pain isn’t always a bad thing, right?
Combat
You have only 3 available actions, attack, block, and use item (if you have one). Each enemy has it’s own attack and block pattern, so it’s your job to pay attention and block as they attack, and attack when they are not blocking. This is fairly easy to do on the dungeon’s upper levels, but the deeper down you go, the more difficult and damaging these monsters get.
As you progress through the campaign the monsters become more complex, and you begin to unravel the surprisingly deep combat. Striking while an enemy is attacking will do extra damage, but it’s hard to pull off without getting hit yourself.
Once acclimated to the combat, the game very much becomes the art of balancing risk with reward. Rushing out with your attacks will dispatch enemies quicker, but will leave you vulnerable to damage.
You must also make sure you are not spamming attacks, due to the attack cooldown timer. Your character’s agility determines how fast this cooldown is, and attacking before its finished will only lengthen it. If you manage to time the cooldown perfectly, you’ll start a combo, which will shorten subsequent cooldowns.
Three’s a Party
The combat is also slightly varied by which character you choose to play. In the beginning of the game you play as the Crusader, but as you complete dungeons you will unlock the ability to play as the Mercenary, and the Witch. Each of these characters has their own special ability which can be activated by holding the attack button. The Crusader regains health, the Witch regenerates magic, and the Mercenary unleashes a high damage attack. In addition to the special ability, each character has their own skill tree. These are skills are unlocked by completing dungeons but then must be bought with gold.
These skill trees are the only persistent skill increases for each character. You will level up your character within the confines of a dungeon, but these skill increases only last for that dungeon. This is actually a brilliant part of the game. Since your character leveling is only on a per dungeon basis, it allows you to experiment with different leveling techniques. Allowing you to try focusing on slow powerful attacks by putting your points into strength, then on the next dungeon trying rapid low damage attacks by focusing on agility. This ability to change your skill set between dungeons adds variety that keeps the game from growing stale.
Loot
In conjunction with your character’s stats, you will have consumables and items. These can be found in dungeons or bought at shops. Items can give you bonuses and negatives to your stats, and your character will only be able to carry one item, and one consumable at a time. If you make it out of the dungeon with any items, you may choose to keep them, or store them in your stash for later use. This can be useful because when your character dies, the items they had equipped are lost.
Side Missions
As you play through the dungeons you also have up to three side missions active. These range from defeating a certain enemy type, to performing X number of combos.These grant you an additional source of gold and XP(which is appreciated), but at times the rewards felt too petty to care about. Offering only a handful of coins and XP, I wished for more substantial missions that felt worth focusing on.Bosses
At the end of every dungeon lives the boss. Whether it’s a priest possessed by demons or a giant blob, the boss fights represent all that is awesome and not so awesome about Deep Dungeons of Doom.
The bosses are beautifully rendered in top notch pixel art, and as the battle music begins you become amped up and ready to defeat the boss, completing the dungeon. But because you’ve never faced this boss before you die after 10 seconds and your 20 minutes of work is lost.
Just like every new enemy you face, the bosses have blocks and attacks you’ve never seen before, so the only way to deal with the situation is experimentation. And experimentation usually leads to death.
Death & Taxes
Death wouldn’t have been a huge deal if the levels were shorter, or Revive tokens been easier to obtain. The only way to have another try without completely replaying the level is to use a Revive token, but the game is far too stingy in giving them out.
The only way to get them is by completing a new dungeon (which means there’s a finite amount you can obtain this way), or by buying them with gold. And earning the amount of gold needed for a token is nearly as painstakingly long.
You can buy gold via an in-app purchase, and it feels that most of the difficulty was put in place to push you into spending more and more money just to complete the game. During my time with the game I felt as though I was frustrated into spending money, and that is not a healthy business model.
