Before I left my friend Tim’s yesterday, I quickly gave him a tour of Amplitude’s Dungeon of the Endless, one of the three games in the studio’s Endless series of sci-fi strategy games and, I think, my favourite of the three overall. Demonstrating the game to Tim reminded me how much I like it, and thus I spent a fair amount of time both last night when I got home and today playing it.
For the uninitiated, Dungeon of the Endless is a peculiar affair somewhere between roguelike, real-time strategy game, turn-based strategy game, tower defense game and board game.
Here’s how it works. Your party of heroes (initially two, but expandable up to four by finding and recruiting additional characters as you progress) have crash-landed in a dungeon. The only way out is to use the otherwise destroyed spacecraft’s energy crystal to power the ancient elevators which proceed upwards through the twelve levels of the complex. Inconveniently, of course, these elevators only go up one floor at a time, so on every level you have to go through the same process of exploring, finding the exit and then transporting the energy crystal from the start point to the exit. Do this twelve times and you win; let the crystal be destroyed or all of your heroes die and you lose.
Each level is randomly generated, and they get larger and more complex as you progress, but still follow the same basic formula. A level is constructed out of individual rooms separated by doors, and opening a door is akin to starting a new “turn” in Dungeon of the Endless’ stablemates Endless Space or Endless Legend. Upon opening a door, you produce a particular amount of Food, Science and Industry, with the exact amount dependent on various conditions, including the heroes you have on your team, the modules you’ve built around the dungeon and whether or not there’s anyone trained to operate said modules and improve their output.
Food is required for healing, levelling up and, occasionally, recruiting new heroes. Science is used for researching new modules to construct and resetting ability cooldowns. Industry is used to actually construct things. There’s also a fourth resource called Dust, whose main use is to increase the power capacity of your crystal. Every ten units of Dust you acquire, you earn the ability to power an additional room. Powered rooms — which have to be connected to the crystal or to other powered rooms — can have modules built in them. Unpowered rooms have the chance of spawning waves of monsters every time you open a door — or indefinitely once one of your party members picks up the crystal and starts transporting it.
Playing the game effectively involves carefully strategising how you can balance exploring the dungeon to find the exit, constructing defensive positions to protect the crystal from attack, and powering rooms in such a way as to prevent enemies spawning in inconvenient locations — or perhaps to funnel them towards an easily-defended position. It’s initially overwhelming, but once you master the basic strategy — power rooms along the path to the exit, place heavy defences in between where the enemies are likely to spawn and where you’re going to be heading — it’s satisfying, but still challenging. As the game progresses, the enemies get stronger and come out in greater numbers, so you’d better have levelled up your heroes and researched some better modules in preparation for the increasing intensity of the assaults.
Being inspired by roguelikes, Dungeon of the Endless has a pleasing amount of replayability thanks to random elements that make each playthrough a little different. The maps are different each time, for starters, but there are also more subtle changes like the technologies available to research. In the last game I played, for example, I had access to the “Knowledge is Power” turrets, which power themselves up significantly according to how much Science you’ve collected. I stockpiled an enormous amount of Science in the earlier levels, meaning that these relatively inexpensive turrets got me through a lot of the game thanks to their astronomical stopping power. (They didn’t help me finish the last level, however, in which you’re very short on power and other resources and powerful monsters just seem to keep coming.)
I haven’t yet tried the multiplayer mode, in which you each control a single hero, but it has the potential to be interesting in a slightly different way to the single-player. I’m interested to try it sometime soon; hopefully the opportunity will arise!
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This title has been on my wishlist for quite a long time. Actually I think Alex Connolly brought it to my attention well before it had ever released because he thought that the visuals would appeal to me. Surprise! The visuals do appeal to me. It’s so pretty I can’t even deal.
I haven’t pulled the trigger on a purchase yet because of the aforementioned RTS and Tower defense elements though. Both are genres that I’m beyond terrible at – and I have very little confidence that I’d be able to get anywhere in the game as a result. Sad. It’s turn-based strategy only for this fella.
I am rubbish at both as well, but I can do quite well in DotE because it’s not really full-on real-time strategy. It’s closer in execution to a turn-based game — as I think I said above, opening a new door in the dungeon is effectively a “new turn” — and there is no micromanagement needed whatsoever. Positioning and formation of heroes isn’t important, for example; you just tell them to move to a specific room, and they will do the most appropriate thing while they’re in there, if anything. There’s also an “active pause” system a la Baldur’s Gate, meaning if things are looking like they might be a bit overwhelming, you can simply pause, survey the situation and queue up orders in advance.
The game is about carefully and strategically setting up your route to the exit, not twitch reflexes. I think you’d get a kick out of it — particularly due to, as you’ve said, the lovely art style.
Alternately, if you’re certain you want to stick to turn based strategy games, I would enthusiastically recommend Endless Legend. Not only is the gameplay more polished than Amplitude’s previous entry, Endless Space, but they realized that in a game where you spend most of your time looking at a map, the map should be the most interesting thing to look at in the game. Not only is it beautiful to look at, it’s really communicates the weirdness of the science-fantasy world that Amplitude put together: giant tree towers grown together from hundreds of individual trunks, slabs of granite peeled from the earth like paper curliques, and fields of multi-hued flowers sending streamers of rainbow pollen skyward are just a few of the features you find spread across the map, and each one is represented beautifully.
Of course, a pretty map isn’t the only thing the game has, and if it were, it wouldn’t be worth much of a recommendation. There’s a good citybuilding system incorporated, each faction has enough variation from the others that they provide a radically different playstyle from each other, and the developer is continually working to improve the AI opponents.
I completed it yesterday for the first time. I’ve enjoyed it very much, but one minor irritation is that you can be scuppered by a factors beyond your control. The latter levels are unforgiving; you get very little dust to power your rooms and the monsters are very tough. Also, the exit can be a million miles away from the start point. So despite making no ‘mistakes’ it is still possible to fall at the final few hurdles.
On my victory run, things went well until the penultimate floor when I lost a hero due to ‘itchy pause finger’. Luckily, I had stockpiled nearly 700 industry and 500 food, and was able to get through the final floor pretty handily. Strangely, having completed it, my desire to play it has dropped from off the scale. Still, I appreciate your recommendation as I got a very enjoyable 25 hours out of it.