Endless Dungeon Review (Rymdkejsaren)
Coming from Dungeon of the Endless, it's tough to express how deeply disappointed I am in this.
They took out everything that made DotE interesting, different, and special. Everything.
The way dust worked in DotE to power rooms and how monsters spawned in dark rooms was GOOD. Hell it was GREAT. The mechanic worked so well to make you anxious about 'just one more door' because the tactics of how many doors you opened and which ones you picked MATTERED. Powering and unpowering rooms MATTERED. Now, you just open all the doors, place turrets at choke points, and hope you find good enough weapons to keep up with the bullet sponge curve. In ED, dust and dark rooms basically have no considerable effects on the game.
What else? The graphics: updated to look like every other game. The music: made more generic. The theme and mood: from creepy and quirky to something flat and tasteless. The writing: stale. (There's a 'revolutionary' who is so tropey after one floor I just wanted him to shut up. 'Down with the capitalist scum' and 'to the barricades' he shouts... as he's mowing down alien bugs on a space station.) It has consolitis, too, though that appears to be the standard these days.
They made it WASD and mouse aim, which would have been awesome if they had actually taken some notes from other such games. You can't dodge. The movement, aiming, and general UI is janky. Auto-aim is on by default, presumably because aiming without it is a nightmare. The projectiles don't strike where you expect them to. This is not something that is hard to get right; I've played plenty of comparable games that have responsive, intuitive controls. Go play Hades for an amazing example of how to do it right. Oh, and if you play solo, expect your AI buddies to make some seriously questionable life choices. And don't expect the healer to heal you when you really need it unless you switch to her mid-combat.
There are some serious bugs, too, both annoying and game-breaking. Twice in 20 hours the crystal bot has gotten stuck in pathing, leading to serious damage. Once I teleported to the bot and got stuck in a place I couldn't move out of. Turrets and enemies repeatedly get soft-locked into a cycle where neither can damage each other enough to kill, so you have to go across the whole map and finish the enemy to end a wave.
The runs are quite long, which would be fine if the game was built so that you could play it to the end on the first try if you were good enough. But now you have to unlock a bunch of crap that makes it more likely to win, including removing arbitrary and deeply unfun difficulty blocks on the final level by repeatedly playing the game (WELCOME TO THE FINAL LEVEL, YOU HAVE NO INCOME LOL). It's the same with the characters. They have four unlocks each, and you have to do the quests ONE AT THE TIME. So tactically, the best thing to do is to play until you have unlocked the next step, then QUIT THE RUN so you can hand it in. What kind of game design is that?
Sigh.
I preordered this on day one and hyped about it for ages. I suppose that was my mistake. I finally got around to playing it as I recently got a new computer. I don't know what happened to Amplitude, but they stopped making the flawed masterpieces we loved. They removed the masterpiece and kept the flaws, and that's how Endless Dungeon feels.
If you aren't coming from DotE, this game may entertain you for a while (wait for a sale), even with it's flawed mechanics and janky controls. But if you are expecting DotE 2, don't bother. This is the popcorn version, the day-time TV DotE, the homeopathy edition. Just play the original.