AMPLITUDE Studios first caught my attention with ENDLESS LEGEND, kept me hooked with ENDLESS SPACE 2, and stole many of my weekends with Humankind. Because of my familiarity with their other games, I was excited to jump into ENDLESS Dungeon, despite the fact that it was of a totally different genre than the other two games and despite me never fully grasping the lore of the ENDLESS franchise. ENDLESS Dungeon managed to live up to and, in fact, exceed my expectations, and while the experience was not altogether smooth, I found myself really enjoying this new personality-packed roguelike.
ENDLESS SPACE 2 fans should recognize the universe of ENDLESS Dungeon. Like I said, I had trouble grasping onto a lot of the lore from ES2 myself (all my campaigns were played as humans and spent blowing everything up with big battleships.) ENDLESS Dungeon opens with an intrepid crew stumbling upon a massive space station long since abandoned by the Endless, being sucked in tractor-beam style, crashing, and subsequently dying. Said intrepid crew is then replaced by a nervous janitor, who joins the ranks of other shipwrecked survivors caught in an infinite deathloop attempting to uncover the Station’s secrets and escape… but mostly just dying.
The familiarity for ENDLESS SPACE 2 fans will end at the lore because, as I mentioned before, ENDLESS Dungeon is a totally different type of game, eschewing AMPLITUDE’s familiar 4X style for a roguelike dungeon-crawler smushed together (brilliantly) with a tower defense game. Players enter procedurally generated levels where they will find a randomized loot pool of weapons and perks, with your lucky drops defining each run. When you die, you respawn back at the hub area—in this case, a makeshift saloon built around the Reloader, a device that both keeps you alive and trapped in the Station—bringing any resources you earned back with you to upgrade your hero and try another run.
Pretty standard roguelike mechanics executed well, but where ENDLESS Dungeon switches things up is with the Crystal Core and towers. You can’t simply navigate the halls of the Station alone; You need to bring your crab-like walking crystal with you to bypass locked doors and proceed through levels. Since this is a giant target to the hordes of enemies that spawn to halt your progress, you have to defend your Crystal both with your big, fancy guns and the large variety of turrets available to you (with a bit of research).
Turrets vary from standard ‘shoot anything in range’ to slowing fields and fire sprinklers. The variety of placeable turrets is great, and the abundance of places to put them both makes for a significant amount of freedom in how you approach the tower defense aspect of the game. Turrets are upgraded with resources you collect by building generators and venturing deeper into the level, an act that both increases the rate of enemy spawns and opens up new paths to your Crystal you’ll have to defend, giving the game a very simple yet mentally stimulating risk/reward system.
More resources means more turrets, which means more enemies and more roads to defend. You’re constantly kept on your toes as increasingly larger hordes of varied enemies, each with their own attack patterns, resistances, and vulnerabilities, make each level more challenging as you progress through it.
The arsenal you’re provided to deal with said enemies feels incredibly nice to use. Good “gun feel” is an essential aspect of any shooting game. While shooting things in ENDLESS Dungeon is as nuances as pointing your mouse somewhere and clicking, each gun has its own fire rate, unique projectile, sounds, and animations that make it really feel like you’re blasting bugs with a big sci-fi gun. As fun as they are, however, I find a lack of variety in the guns available.
This is largely due to the fact that guns are categorized into two types, and your character is restricted to which type they can use. If you’re playing solo, you can swap between characters, allowing you to try out the other types you find in drops. This option isn’t available in multiplayer, though, and there’s also the fact that some guns just aren’t as fun to use or are too difficult—I struggled with the many beam weapons that required a long charge-up time. I found myself going with the minigun and rocket launcher each time I could find them, and you’ll undoubtedly have one or two guns you like that you’ll stick to.
You won’t really notice, though, because the good gun feel I mentioned means the guns you really like will feel fun to use throughout. The increasingly bigger hordes, tight hallways, and big explosive guns lead to exciting moments of you and your squad raining hellfire into tiny doorways absolutely crammed with giant bugs, robots, and demonic-like beings, praying to your trigger finger they don’t make it through as your crystal crab slowly hacks a door. All the way, a tense and exciting score of Western-yet-sci-fi tunes blares over the gunfire and screeching.
The characters, for the most part, are all visually interesting and have standout personalities. They all also feature unique abilities, and while I kept forgetting to use them as often as I should have, you can find that various party compositions can create interesting and powerful dynamics for clearing dungeons.
Fun as it was, my experience with the game was not without its hiccups. Notably, I found that occasionally, my guns wouldn’t fire when clicked or would play the firing sound without producing projectiles. This happened often enough that it was present on every level I played, leading to enemies getting way closer than they should have. I also experienced some severe frame drops later in my playthrough. While annoying, these bugs weren’t bad enough to seriously hamper my experience. Overall, I enjoyed the game, especially in multiplayer, and will be playing a lot more of it outside of this review.
The Final Word
ENDLESS Dungeon takes a familiar, lore-rich universe and throws it into new territory. The clever combination of roguelike and tower defense elements creates a unique spin on both genres. The wealth of characters and enemy varieties means you always have something cool to shoot at and someone cool to shoot at it with. While the game is stronger with friends, multiplayer and solo campaigns will surely delight with brutal gunplay and banging Western sci-fi tracks.
9
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