Published: 27 Aug 2024
Last updated: 1 Sep 2024
- Developed and Published by: Amplitude Studios
- Released on: 2014
- Genres: Roguelike, Dungeon Crawler, Tower Defence
- Rating: 3/5
- Originally written: 27th January 2024
A very odd mish-mash of genres, bolting a Tower Defence game onto a Roguelike Dungeon Crawler (or vice versa), with other aspects of resource/economy and hero management. By and large though, all these systems do come to complement each other pretty well, even if not perfectly.
While the games’ tutorial is functionally non-existent, once you start to understand what is expected and what is broadly a winning strategy in DotE, the core gameplay loop is actually very fun. You explore a dungeon one door at a time to gain resources and find loot, but then are faced with a wave of monsters (akin to a wave in Tower Defence) to defend against. Once cleared, you have all the time you need to strategise, assess, and then repeat the door-opening process.
Once you get the hang of this it is very enjoyable to go through this loop - however DotE is a tough, tough game that does not pull punches, and due to the Roguelike nature of the game it can quickly sour the mood. A successful run of this game is ~6 hours worth of gameplay (which is too long, I’d cut the number of floors down), which is asking a lot to get right consistently, and extremely frustrating to throw away 3-4 hours worth of time and effort down the tubes. DotE doesn’t always play fair either unfortunately, randomness may be a fickle mistress but some quirks in design make this game feel downright unfair or “cheap”, which for something already so tough and long is just salt in the wound.
Definitely worth taking the game for a spin and beating on Too Easy difficulty (ha ha guys, very funny), and may come back to this to try the other pods which do change the gameplay quite a bit (I just stuck to the default Escape Pod) - whether I have time or inclination is another story.
