Dungeon crawling in video games is one thing I’ve always been a fan of. Exploring a dungeon, fighting monsters, finding treasure; it’s marvelous. I’ve never quite seen dungeon crawling taken in the direction Guild Of Dungeoneering takes it, though. Guild Of Dungeoneering is a game I can’t really place in any specific genre; if I were to do so, I’d probably say a mix of strategy and roleplaying, but mostly strategy. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really begin to describe this goofy little game.
Guild Of Dungeoneering is a game that places you in the role of a disgruntled hero who was just rejected from joining a famous guild of dungeon explorers. Looking to get back at the guild, your character decides to found his own guild known as The Guild Of Dungeoneering. It’s your goal to build a strong guild and attract powerful dungeoneers to help you gain glory and gold.
The first phase of gameplay is the guild screen. This is where you can expand your guild to gain new items and dungeoneers, and see what dungeoneers you already have at your disposal. With gold, you can buy new items and rooms for your guild. Some rooms give you new dungeoneers, which act as classes. You can only have one of each type of dungeoneer at the same time; though if one dies, a new one immediately takes its place.
When you want to go on a quest, you’ll be given a map screen with all of the dungeons currently available to you. Each dungeon has a certain number of quests that require you to meet different objectives. For example: Some quests have you kill a certain amount of creatures, find a certain amount of treasure, or kill a boss. When you enter a dungeon, you’ll see that Guild Of Dungeoneering is not your typical dungeon crawler.
The actual “dungeoneering” part of the game is one of the most interesting ideas I’ve ever seen in a tabletop-like rpg. Instead of having a randomly generated or pre-built dungeon, you have to build the dungeon with random cards given to you on the fly. Each turn you take, you can pick up to three cards to place in the dungeon; these include rooms, gold, and monsters. This is what makes the game interesting: You have to strategize how to proceed through a dungeon as each turn comes. What makes this more interesting is that you can’t move your dungeoneer. They go where they want, so you must entice them into specific rooms with treasure or monsters.
Fighting monsters is very simple: You draw a few cards, and must pick one that you think is suitable to combat the creature. There are no special skills or spells here, so it makes everything very easy. You have physical attacks, magical attacks, physical blocks, and magical blocks — That’s it. It makes combat so incredibly simple yet so complex at the same time. Some cards can block magic and attack with physical, some can draw extra cards if successful, some will hurt you in exchange for massive damage to the enemy. The combat really is satisfying, especially when you manage to make good moves and keep the enemy from even touching you.
Unfortunately, the battles can also be quite unfair. Several times I would encounter an enemy that would pound me with high damage attack after high damage attack, and I would just getting horrible card draws. When it comes down to this, there’s really nothing you can even do to help yourself, and it becomes frustrating.
Defeating monsters gives you loot. You can equip loot to give you new cards to use in battle, or increase your health. This loot can only be equipped while in the dungeon. It doesn’t matter if you survive or not — it leaves you when you leave the dungeon. Some loot will even give you useless cards that do nothing, which adds a bit of risk vs. reward to the mix.
While the gameplay in Guild Of Dungeoneering is quite addicting, it can get very repetitive if you don’t play it in short bursts. I could only manage to play the game for about 30-40 minutes before getting burnt out. The problem is that there’s no real change in gameplay — You go into a dungeon, you build it around your character, you win or lose, rinse and repeat. While the objectives are varied, they’re not that varied. Not to mention, dying over and over on the same quest is quite frustrating.
The humor in Guild of Dungeoneering is probably its strongest point: Dungeoneer names are absolutely hilarious (I had a hero named Uhhh at one point.), items and monsters are just strange, and the use of music is one of the most clever things I’ve ever seen in a game. The game doesn’t really have a soundtrack per se, rather it has a bunch of musical cues. The game will sing to you about everything — You built a blacksmith? The game will sing you a little 10 second song about how you built a blacksmith. Not only is it just clever, but the lyrics to these “songs” are quite funny, and made me chuckle every time without fail.
The graphics in Guild Of Dungeoneering are very nice. They have a sort of “I got bored during math class” sketchbook feel to them, with cute, disproportionate characters. I do wish the art popped a little more, as the pencil sketckwork does get a little bland after a while, but I don’t think it detracts from gameplay at all.
Guild Of Dungeoneering is quite an oddity, but a good oddity at that. Its charming, silly nature alone is enough to recommend it, but it’s also addictive and fun. Sure it can get a bit repetitive and frustrating after playing it for a little bit, but those issues are menial enough that you’ll be back for more after too long.
A press copy of Guild Of Dungeoneering was provided by Versus Evil for the purpose of this review.