So I recently heard of this game, called Dungeon Crawler: Stone Soup and decided to try it out. So far, I’ve only gotten down about 4 floors, and my best game is a bit over 400. Veteran players I’m sure will insist I haven’t played far enough to appreciate the game properly enough to review it. But I am anyway.
Difficulty: 2/5 Stars- Easy to die; frustrating to die.
Difficulty is something that has to be done right in a game. This game has the ‘difficult’ part, but not the ‘challenge’ part. Advancing in the game seems more like inching forward at the grace of the gaming gods rather than any specific increase in skill or ability.
My first death in the game was because for some arbitrary reason, my shield was blocking my ability to attack in battle, every round. My second death was because I walked into an area and 4 enemies swarmed at me and there was no corridor to narrow them down into a single file line.
Running is a recommended way to survive the game. Coincidentally my third death proves this wrong. A powerful enemy attacked my character; It’s exact strength I discovered when it punched me for nearly half of my health. I attempted then to flee. Every movement my character made, the enemy matched, I tried to climb the stairs, and found that it followed, I went around blocks, halls, and corridors. Nothing at all could shake the thing, so finally I had to stop and just attack it to die.
At a certain point, it felt like dying is something that can often be unavoidable. That by no fault of the player, they can be faced with a situation where nothing they do can prevent themselves from being killed, such as being low on health when a trap completely arbitrarily appears out of literally nowhere to kill you when you are trying to move to a corner to rest in. I would now mention that death in this game is permanent.
At one point, I decided to try being a summoner in order to avoid being in direct danger; only to after a few floors ‘miscast’ a spell and summon a small army of imps to kill me.
Perma-death in a game where you can die for arbitrary and random reasons is not a good thing to have. It only causes added frustration, for very little real sense of accomplishment. I can’t help but feel that this is to ‘pad out’ the game.
Customization: 4/5 stars- Lots of choices, but unclear what they are
You have a ton of races and classes to choose from, unfortunately none of them are described properly on the selection screen. Trial and error is the only real way to go, but considering this is a game where you perma-die trial and error is a long, dull, and frustrating experience.
Content: 2/5 stars- Lots of items, lots of redundancy
There are plenty of items, as well, many items that need identification. Unfortunately, there are many items that are so redundant that they fail to make sense. I have run across 5 different kinds of basically chain armor, with exactly the same stats. The same goes for several other pieces of equipment.
Many scrolls and potions can do bad things to you or your gear. Unfortunately, you have to blindly use them until you find out which scrolls are scrolls of identify and can get a lot of them. This means that most of the time when you find potions and scrolls you have to waste them just to see what they are.
Monsters are also various, which may be troublesome on the ASCII version; I used the tileset because I don’t really like looking at ASCII so much. While many different monsters exist, again, many are basically exactly the same as other monsters. Maybe the differences begin to show themselves later. Don’t know.
Overall: 3/5 stars- Ok game for it’s type but not exceptional.
Some people love a frustrating challenge, and for them, this game will probably keep them entertained. Personally, I prefer Etrian Odyssey as a ‘hard dungeon crawler’ Sure the bosses can be cheap as heck, and grinding is essential, but that game focuses on preparation and strategy more than praying and being about a skittish as a squirrel.
I didn’t include some of the normal categories of scoring, such as sound and graphics as those do not really apply in this case, it’s blatantly ‘old school style’ and so isn’t aiming to win any awards there.
Final thoughts:
If you enjoy a game that frustrates you while you inch along in progress a bit at a time, you’ll probably like it. If you get attached to your characters, or enjoy exploring and defeating everything there is, you probably will not.