What surprised me about LoD is that I installed it and fired it up thinking it had art assets in line with the artwork on its cards, which is how you say "not the good". Actually it might be conveyed as 'ugly' and I'm not really sure why... Instead, I was surprised to see a super retro looking game that reminds me of long lost days of fiddling with my cousin's commodore something like two and a half decades ago. The game is not quite 2d, but it is close, with a brought forward pixelated 3d style that I really dig on. The game looks fantastic, and the screenshots don't do it justice, since it looks really slick in motion.The game itself is essentially a very stripped down dungeon crawler. I'm not absolutely certain as to the story, or frankly, even the goal as I didn't bother to play the game enough to finish it. You enter the dungeon, which divides into levels. There is no real unified style (as best I can tell) within given levels, but it does mark your descent and it seems to grow in difficulty the further down you go. You basically look for apples or loot, and battle various infinitely respawning monsters lovingly rendered in the weird retro 3d world.
You hit monsters. They, as far as I can tell, seem to operate mostly around the generic retro 'body touch hurts' system, though they do seem to have attack animations as well. Once you hit monsters, you collect XP globules and eventually level up which ... Does something? I can tell you gain +10 health, but beyond that, I can't really figure out which number means what in the damage system. Chalk it up to not paying enough attention or the game not explaining itself well, your choice. I lean more toward the latter, but hey, what is text when you can put in bare minimum effort?
You can also acquire loot, which has basically the saddest inventory system I've ever seen. You can't pick between items, you just desperately flip through them, with one item becoming equipped and it isn't your weapon. You can pick up all sorts of wacky stuff, including spellbooks that summon monsters or allies, and piles of kittens which you can toss down to ... Like, it's a kitten.
I guess it is supposed to be retro or whatever, but the inventory system is a tragedy and I can't be arsed to figure out what the different stat numbers are supposed to mean. Numbers change when you put different loot on, but other than moving slower or faster it takes too much empirical testing to nail it down and snore. Bored now, throwing my character in lava.The lava looks really good. What is it with retro style pixels displaying lava best?
The game's music and audio in general is excellent. If you want to pay a dollar for an amazing chillout session, this game will give you some great chillout tunes to just relax to. I mean the dopey, who cares gameplay doesn't get in the way of just hitting zombies with an old rusty sword while listening to some nice ambient tunes. Ahhh. It's not bad for a bit.
On my first runthrough of LoD, I hit the 'use' button and was killed or something by one of the patrons of the bar at the top of the dungeon, then when I went to the dungeon, I got one shot by a snake. Neat?
On my second runthrough, I got down to like level 6 or 7, and then was killed by a giant swarm of warlocks. And by that I mean, I encountered like 12 of them, turned around to see one of them and thought 'I can take one of them if 12 of them spawn at a time'. I could not.
On my third runthrough, I got down to level 3, which apparently had no exit after ten minutes of flipping through the doors. I wondered if maybe the game had like, dead ends or something. I eventually ended up all the way back up to the tavern, which wasn't where I wanted to end up. Then it wouldn't let me leave the tavern anymore, so after a minute or two of fiddling with it, I just reset the game. Most of my playthroughs worked essentially like these two. You wander around for a while, and then something vastly more difficult than the general door to door enemies kills you.
Frankly, Legend of Dungeon is a lazy game. The music and art assets are soothing, but the completely lack of inventory management, explanation of the statistics or what things do, or basically anything beyond trial and erroring you way through the game is irritating. Potions, for example, have specific color/names combinations but you don't really know what they did. Usually they make you barf, which is great, but the non-barf ones don't explain themselves, and neither group is re-labeled by the game into what it does.So I guess I'm supposed to write down the stats of the items I'm re-equipping, because it doesn't compare or doesn't display it in a visually easy to determine way (I think it does? But I'm not sure) and it doesn't tell you what anything does.
If you want to just start a new game, then go punch some bats and listen to the excellent ambient score, it is an excellent game. But beyond that it is a slow paced, lazily built game that expresses all of the low-points of modern "roguelike" design without ever really stretching into anything else. There is little depth to the gameplay, and it comes off as clumsy, imprecise and just rather sleepy. I feel like this is all rather intentional, which means if it sounds like something you're into - great - but otherwise, I'd give this one a pass.
Perhaps some of these elements are 'features' keyed to being 'retro styled'. But like I said in the Shovel Knight review, retro does not make your design unassailable. If your features suck, they suck, the end. Ultimately, this game is very close in most elements to Hero Siege, but doing almost everything shared worse. I wish Hero Siege was done in this engine, and not much else.Great art and great music though, and the engine is pretty great for the retro feeling. Its a shame Legend of Dungeon is, to be honest, roguelike. If it was an actual down to the bottom properly crafted game with some fixes to the ridiculous inventory, I think it would have been great. As is, like I said, if you can get it cheap the first few playthroughs are some wonderful chillout.
