Nonetheless there is plenty of variation amongst the pool of twenty-odd heroes you can eventually unlock, from slow, heavy machinegunners capable of holding back entire waves by themselves to quick, light melee characters who get torn apart if you let them get swarmed, but who are capable of responding quickly to unexpected monster incursions and who often have additional passive abilities to make up for it. This was what threw me the first time I played the game I’d gone in expecting it to be heavier on the roguelike side, but the heroes in DotE are much more like powerful mobile turrets than they are traditional roguelike characters - you’re concerned with their strategic placement on the map, not their second-by-second involvement in a scrap. Usually it’s monsters, and your heroes will deal with them in a very hands-off fashion: your only control over them is telling them which room to go to, and if they happen to be sharing said room with monsters they’ll engage in combat with them automatically. The heroes begin in a room with your all-important power crystal the room will have one or more doors that you can open to reveal another room beyond, and this unexplored room can contain anything from monsters to resources to additional heroes you can recruit into your party. The basic setup available to first-time players of the game (you can unlock more game customisation options later on) starts you out with a party of two heroes out of a possible four. We’ll get to the reasons for that at the end of the review, but in the meantime it’s important to remember that DotE does a hell of a lot right. DotE is a smart, well-made game that still ended up underwhelming me slightly in spite of its quality and its cleverness. I’d like to tell you that it was a Damascene conversion and that Dungeon of the Endless is the best not-tower defence game since the first Defence Grid, but I would be lying. It wasn’t until I gave it a second chance after Christmas and accepted it on its own merits - rather than cramming it into a niche where it didn’t fit - that Dungeon of the Endless really clicked for me. I certainly bounced off the surface the first time I played it because it wasn’t what I’d been led to expect – playing it like a roguelike simply didn’t work, and it didn’t seem quite tower-defencey enough (you start off with a grand total of one offensive tower, which doesn’t exactly promote strategy) to engage the strategy part of my brain. That it’s picked up those labels in spite of its unique qualities indicates that it’s been pigeonholed nevertheless, however, and I think that to describe it as a “roguelike tower defence” could end up misleading people. ![]() ![]() This is partially a reflection of DotE’s refusal to be pigeonholed while it does indeed smoosh together some elements from both genres (you build towers to hold off waves of advancing baddies, but you also have a party of four characters who you outfit in looted equipment and level up as the dungeon progresses) into a single game, it also has some very interesting mechanics that have nothing to do with it being either a tower defence or a roguelike, and which can only be found in DotE. Chances are that if you load up a review of Dungeon of the Endless - any review, doesn’t really matter which one - you will see, at some point, the words “tower defence” and “roguelike” in very close proximity to one another 1.
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