I’m playing Dungeonmans, and even if it has some addicting quality at first, as you kill & loot shit, it isn’t convincing me:
-Supposing you aren’t killed early and play conservatively, the first 5 hours of a run are a bit boring, too easy.
-Runs are indeed too long, given you mostly juggle the same 3-4 abilities usually in a single run. As part of that, you level too slowly from level 6 onwards, and the gameplay gets stale because of that. The game should be shorter and you should level up a bit faster, so you always get new skills every x time to play around.
-I dislike games where 85% of the combat is ‘filler’, most of the time in ‘adventurous’ dungeons I don’t bother see what type of enemies I’m hitting or what abilities do they have, I just advance and kill everything, letting the auto-target select whatever enemy.
-I dislike games with this resting system, there is no penalty for using it, it’s basically the turn-based equivalent of health-regeneration. Advance a bit, kill 3-4 enemies, rest, rinse, repeat. Sometimes you are interrupted but it’s a single monster so you kill it without problems and rest again.
-You may say at this point I should go to a harder dungeon or raise the difficulty, but it’s hard to skip dungeons that have valuable xp, and the difficulty balance is tricky: bosses are much harder than the rest of the game, so if I raise the difficulty, the moment I will reach a boss the game will be too hard, not too easy.
-Ironically this doesn’t mean I don’t die, some of my deaths (outside bosses) came because the game trains me to fall in a zen-like status of advancing and killing shit without looking at numbers or even using most abilities, and then a special enemy kills me or poisoner gets me without me noticing the poison drain 80% of my health. Even if I had dozens of consumables to avoid my death. It’s a type of game design that would be more appropriate with a quicksave system, instead of the roguelike (one and done). A small thing, but having the health bar tucked to the right corner also affects me, increasing this dumb mistakes I make.
-There are some cheap kills like the top of the towers where you fight a boss, unlike any other dungeons before, the stairs magically disappear so you cannot retreat when you see that floor level is too high for you.
-95% of the loot is crap, garbage fated to be sold or be scrapped in the academy. I also dislike this kind of ‘looting’ model. I don’t even bother looking at what I’m picking from the ground, I just clear up two or three dungeons in a row and then go back to identify everything in one go, favorite a pair of pieces maybe, and the throw everything else.
-The overworld map lacks info, the number system is crap to see what is a town and what a dungeon (why not use small icons?) so you have to use the filters enabling and disable them. To show level of dungeon is, and what level of town is (merchandise level, like 4/6) would also a good idea.
-The inventory system is crap: no way to order by rating, gold, number of items (for consumables) or any other way.