I don't usually write reviews, but seeing all the negative ones for this game motivates me. Honestly I'm really confused by all the negativity this game is getting, because my experience with it has been nothing but awesome. So let me address some of the complaints I've been seeing, in case you're like me and they made you really wary of buying. Note that I've only played single player, and only on the hardest difficulty, so I can't speak to other settings or modes. I'll stick to what I know and not address the complaints about multiplayer. The companion AI is overall great. Characters you're not controlling dodge AoE effects with superhuman ability. They equip weapons intelligently (switching to ones that are more effective for their situation), and they use their active abilities competently too. The only thing they're kinda bad at is using short-range weapons; they tend to take damage. The only thing they don't do at all is use their ultimates, but that's actually preferable because it means you can precisely control when ultimates get used by swapping characters. Diversity between characters, weapons, and runs is great. No idea what people who say every run/gun/character is the same are thinking. There are so many variables that completely change the rules and feel of a run, and not just the recently-added station cards (though those do help a lot). Many of the drinks and chips are completely game-altering. Weapons vary wildly in range, firing speed, area of effect, elemental effects, etc. Characters only have three abilities each (passive, active, ultimate) but those abilities are wildly different between them—and the diversity is increased even more when you factor in stats like attack power, defense, and the biggest one, Wit, which determines whether you want a character doing more shooting or more turret buffing and maintenance. Enemies are as diverse or more as they were in Dungeon of the Endless. There are siege bots that can outrange your turrets and will gradually mow through them if you don't pick them off. There are enemies who will go out of their way to target your generators. There are invisible dudes who sneak up on you. There are zerg-swarm guys that split into littler zerg-swarm guys when they die. There are melee dudes who take almost no damage if you shoot them in the front so you have to flank them. If you treat all enemies as the same basic mooks, you'll be left wondering why this one has so much health and defense, or that one killed all the turrets you placed on the other side of the map, or how the other one got by you to snipe a generator when you weren't looking. A lot of people have called this game mindless, or too easy, and I just don't agree in the slightest. Maybe it's mindless on the easier difficulties, but I consider myself a strategy gamer first and foremost, and on Hard there is an addictive level of strategy. You have to think carefully about which doors to open to control monster pathing, and you have to be careful where you place your turrets to set up the best sightlines and killboxes while conserving resources. Your crystal bot needs to move around a few times to get through a level, so you need to take that into account too when choosing where to set up. Tons of people are taking it as a given that this game has no content. Really? It's a $30 roguelike. A single run on Hard will almost certainly take you multiple hours—way longer than a single run of DotE or Hades for sure. And you'll be doing many, many runs to complete the character quests alone—to say nothing of all the extra challenges you can take on (via drinks etc.). There's plenty of content on offer here for the price. Maybe not quite as much as Hades overall, but certainly comparable. So many reviews on here say this game is nothing like Dungeon of the Endless, which I also don't agree with. I love DotE, but I love this more. And sure, there are differences...but most of them for the better. The twin-stick shooting mechanics are new, sure, but they pretty much just replace the room-dancing micromangement from DotE. The "completely different genre" criticisms are super exaggerated. People saying DotE was way deeper or more complicated are out of their minds. I've cleared the original DotE plenty of times over the years, and enjoyed it, but that game is dead simple compared to this. With more to do to micromanage each character, more movement of the crystal, more things to research and upgrade, more variance between runs, more damage type weaknesses and weapon switching...this game objectively has more going on. DotE had more characters, but those characters were much more samey than these, with tons of overlapping skills. They did a lot less too—mostly you'd have one character open doors and the rest you'd leave parked in rooms. How is that more complicated or interesting? ("It's only 4 floors" is such a disingenuous criticism. Each floor has multiple zones, easily evening out the number of levels between the two games—and individual zones in Endless Dungeon take WAY longer to clear than any floor in DotE in my experience.) I also saw a review claiming the music was inferior to the original, which must have been posted by someone who hadn't played the original in quite some time because the soundtrack is basically a remastered version of it with new additions to boot. I recognized every melody from the original game (there were only a few, man...) along with the new tracks, which are fine. Some of the music in the saloon is really nice. I've seen a lot of complaints about bugs. Maybe there were a lot more at launch or something, I don't know. I've experienced two bugs, and neither of them actually affected my gameplay experience. (If you're curious: one showed a character as KOed on the minimap when they had already been revived, which lasted until I switched to that character; the other bug caused turrets that you get for free via a station card, when spawning in unpowered rooms, to be broken until replaced by a different turret.) The only complaints I've seen that really have any weight are the ones about the dialogue writing. It's cringey and campy. But for what it's worth, it really comes off as intentional—the kind of cringe you get from a so-bad-it's-good movie. The voice acting is perfectly serviceable. And honestly, I don't know what fans of other Amplitude games were expecting. The dialogue in DotE was cringe in the same way. And the characters? The original game had stuff like Team Fortress 2 clones and a character whose entire schtick was being an anagram of Samus Aran. Maybe the new aesthetic isn't to everyone's taste, but the new game has way more depth of personality. People complaining about Denuvo also have a leg to stand on, I guess, but the unfortunate reality is that Denuvo is all over the place on Steam. And for what it's worth, I have not noticed any frame-rate dips at all. The game's performance has been remarkably smooth for me, Denuvo or not. (Per the devs this game also only uses Denuvo DRM, and not Denuvo anti-cheat, which is way more invasive.) The bottom line, for me, is this: if you liked Dungeon of the Endless, and if you like either twin-stick shooters or arcade-style roguelikes like Hades (which this game transparently takes a ton of inspiration from), there is a strong chance you'll like this. Thanks, Amplitude. I'm having a great time.
Read more