One Life Left: Dungeon of the Endless

Your ship is shot down in orbit over an uncharted planet. You and one other shipmate manage to make it onto one of the remaining escape pods and are sent careening toward the planet’s surface. Unlucky for you, the escape pod doesn’t stop when it hits the surface. The escape pod buries itself deep into the planet. There is only one way to go and that’s up.

Dungeon of the Endless is a squad-based, top-down, dungeon crawler.  The game focuses on your ability to manage a small team as you gather resources, defend yourself against hostile aliens and recruit other survivors as you slowly climb through the extensive dungeon hidden beneath the planet’s surface.  The game moves forward as you open doors on each floor of the dungeon. Behind each door lies any number of things. Monsters, resources, merchants and other survivors are only some of the possible outcomes of opening a door. Once all of the doors on a floor are opened, the player must successfully muster all of their characters as well as the power supply crystal to the floor’s elevator while fighting off swarms of aliens to progress to the next floor.

Dungeon of the Endless has a lot going on at once. As the player, you have to be in complete control of all aspects of the game to succeed. You need to make sure you are generating the right resources and spending them at the right time. You also have to stay on top of which rooms you keep powered and which to leave off. In addition, characters need to be assigned roles and placed in strategic locations. Lastly, the player must monitor all their characters during waves of hostile aliens. If this sounds stressful, that would be because it is. The game is very difficult which makes it that much more fulfilling when you complete a successful run. The game has two difficulty settings: very easy and easy. Don’t be misled. This is cruel joke on the part of the developers. The settings should be labeled as “Very Hard” and “Lord Help Your Soul”.

The game is built around replayability. Every time you beat the game, you unlock new ways to play. This variety comes in a couple different ways. When you recruit a new survivor, you unlock that character and can start any future game with that character. The other way the game can change is with the addition of new escape pods. The different pods offer different challenges for the player. These challenges include the removal of healing abilities and the removal of certain resources from the game to name a couple. Extra challenges like these ones prevent the game from becoming stale even after multiple successful playthroughs. There is always one more difficulty to test your resolve and your ability to work as a team.

One of my favorite aspects of the game was its multiplayer feature. You can play the game with up to three of your friends. This gives the game a social component that makes any game better. Some of the stress is alleviated because you can split responsibilities up between players. However, this by no means makes the game easier. You are simply trading one type of difficulty for another. Multiplayer removes the ability to pause the game. In addition, there is the added element of maintaining a clear line of communication between you and your teammates. Each player must fulfill their role perfectly if the team hopes to be at all successful in making it to the next floor. The builder has to keep resource supplies up. The researcher has to make sure new defenses and resource generators are constantly being researched. Finally, the door man acts as the final checkpoint, making sure all other duties are completed before opening the next door. I spent more than a couple late nights over vacation desperately trying to complete a run with friends. Most ended in laughs as a lack of communication led to multiple doors being opened at once, which resulted in an unmanageable horde of aliens overwhelming our characters.

Overall, I give Dungeon of the Endless an eight out of 10. The game does what it set out to do and does it well. However, I never felt like the game went the extra mile to shock or wow me. At the end of the day, Dungeon of the Endless is a very solid game and definitely worth picking up with a group of friends. You will have no shortage of challenges or excuses to yell at each other for scrapping a perfectly good run two hours in.