Dungeon of the Endless Review (PC)

Dungeon of the Endless is a quirky little side project from French video game creators Amplitude Studios, makers of the acclaimed strategy titles Endless Space and Endless Legend.

In a nutshell, it's a roguelike / tower defense hybrid with a solid, pixelated art style, set in the same universe as the developer's other two games. However, it bears the distinct mark of the Amplitude pedigree, offering an engaging and strategic experience, in spite of its more casual / random initial outlook.

I liked Amplitude's turn-based strategy titles a lot, and I was intrigued by Dungeon of the Endless, in no small part due to the superb, colorful and flashy pixel graphics, so I jumped right in quite enthusiastically.

Story

You assume control of the survivors of a crashed spacecraft, trying to survive on an alien planet, discovering a network of underground tunnels and the remnants of ancient technology, the only evidence of a now extinct civilization.

The destinies of the few survivors reside within your grasp, and it's up to you to gather resources and build an infrastructure and mount up a defense, exploring the labyrinth room by room.

Dungeon of the Endless is thematically tied to the universe Amplitude's strategy games take place in, as the planet you have crashed on is Auriga itself, one of the prime bases of the ancient space-faring race known as the Endless.

Exiting your escape pod, you find yourself stranded many floors below the planet's surface, in a huge, sprawling facility overrun by countless unknown horrors. You have to make your way to the surface floor by floor, clearing the hostile alien life forms and making the most out of the limited resources you find along your way.

A great adventure commences!

Gameplay

You start with a team of two heroes, stranded in a small room powered by your escape pod's power module. You start opening doors, gathering resources, fending off attacks from the aliens, powering new rooms, building new structures, and so on and so forth ad nauseam until you get to the top floor or die, the latter having a much greater chance of being the outcome of your toils.

Dungeon of the Endless uses the FIDS resource system pioneered by Endless Space. With each door opened, you earn a small quantity of food, industry, science and dust, which functions as both currency and a source of power.

Killing enemies will also earn you a little dust, and (if you're fortunate) you can also stumble upon hidden caches of resources, or chests containing various pieces of weaponry or armor, to outfit your heroes.

Industry is used for building new structures, food for healing, recruiting and leveling heroes, and science for unlocking new technology, such as better defensive and offensive turrets and structures, and better resource generators.

You start off with a team of two brave warriors, but the count can be upped to a maximum of four, which you will encounter and recruit while exploring the dungeon.

Each time you open a new door, you get a small number of resources, based on your current yield, and gain access to a new random room. Rooms can have treasure chests, vendors, new heroes, and minor and major structure slots in them, and in order to build anything in a room (and have it function too), you need enough dust to power it up.

Having a room all lit up not only improves the pixelated visuals with a bit of extra polish, it also prevents monsters from spawning there, so you can employ unused dust to control where you get attacked from.

Of course, you'll never have enough dust to power everything, so choosing what and when to switch on and off is just one part of the many strategic decisions you'll have to make in order to ensure your survival.

Establishing chokepoints through which to drive all incoming aliens is also a much smarter approach than simply building turrets everywhere, especially since you won't have enough resources to fortify your entire base.

The overhead map is useful for quickly routing power

Leveling heroes will make them slightly stronger and offer them extra abilities, such as being able to repair damaged structures after a battle, or to bestow a small defensive or offensive buff when fighting alongside teammates.

Overall, it's a game of gaining small, incremental advantages over the unforgiving dungeon. You don't control the heroes directly, you just tell them what room to head to, and they engage enemies or find something else to do by themselves.

Employing the heroes' mobility is key to surviving the hordes of incoming monsters, as turrets are usually too weak to be able to finish off stronger or bunched-up enemies, and you're going to spring a lot of leaks.

The aliens are always drawn toward your energy core, so you can sort of plot their route by powering certain rooms up or down, focusing on the best way to take them down with a concerted attack, instead of spreading your forces too thin.

Aside from primary resource generation buildings, you'll also be able to build a vast array of turrets, with effects ranging from area of effect damage to slowing enemies down, complete with support buildings that give your other structures extra defense or increase the health points total of nearby heroes.

There are a lot of random combinations that you will stumble upon while kicking doors down, and it's going to take you a few playthroughs to figure out what best suits your play style, as well as where to focus your efforts.

There are also new starting spaceships and heroes to unlock, ensuring that you also have other goals once you start mastering survival, and there is an album section that gets filled in with various relevant pieces of concept art and flavor text, gradually revealing more about the characters that you're leading into battle, and about the mysterious world you are exploring.

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Sound and visuals

The first thing that caught my eye, a few months ago when the game was announced, was the superb way that Amplitude's artists employ pixels. The game looks great, with vivid colors and rich special effects, and the backgrounds are littered with the artifacts of an ancient civilization.

Everything, from the choice of color to the animations of the lowliest spider that will try to make you its dinner, is done with painstaking attention to detail, and it looks gorgeous.

It very quickly becomes apparent that the high-resolution pixel art is not a way to cut on the visual budget, but a way to convey a unique idea in a very powerful, personalized manner. If there are occasions where pixel art can detract from the overall atmosphere and experience, this is certainly not it.

If anything, the seemingly simplistic visuals only enhance the frugal undertones of your adventure, and it's the same with the sound design, everything goes well together and fits right in, further contributing to the game's atmospheric feel, to the overpowering sensation of dread and hopelessness.

The music is a welcome companion through your woes, combining the base elements of old-school chiptunes with modern, high-definition compositions, feeling somehow both ancient and brand new.

Overall, Dungeon of the Endless' artistic direction, in both visuals and sound production, is an uncanny marriage, a throwback to our childhood, that somehow manages to also feel very contemporary, very up-to-date, and to convey more than just stuff moving on the screen, to immerse one in the unforgiving journey through the decrepit game world.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion