It’s really easy to over-explainEndless Dungeon. Amplitude’s spiritual successor to its first game, Dungeon of the Endless, is an unholy mashup of genres, including roguelike, tower defense, and twin-stick shooter. It’s a class-based, tactical, top-down, co-op, real-time, horde-based, action dungeon crawler, and a few other things I’m probably forgetting. But describing it as a collection of familiar systems and mechanics would betray how simple and compelling the core gameplay loop actually is.
Endless Dungeon is a dungeon crawler all about risk taking, careful planning, and situational awareness. It’s a game where small choices can have catastrophic consequences if you aren’t aware and prepared. It oscillates between quiet moments of planning and chaotic events where things quickly get out of hand, sometimes without even a moment’s notice. If you vibe with that kind of high-stakes gameplay, all of the genre-vomit that defines Endless Dungeon won’t get in the way at all.
Related:Bloodborne Fans Are Going To Dig Mina The Hollower
Roguelikes tend to struggle with risk versus reward. Things get harder as you progress, but the choices you make usually boil down to the strength of your gear or the playstyle you adopt during that particular run. It’s not often you can make a wrong choice in a game like Dead Cells or Hades, but in Endless Dungeon, every decision you make has a huge impact on how far you’ll be able to progress, and the longer you play the more you realize how impactful even the smallest decision can be.
It starts with exploration. Every door you open on the space station increases the chances of triggering an enemy wave. You never know when it will happen, but the more you wander around each floor of the station looking for weapons and upgrades, the higher the chances are that you’ll end up facing down more enemy hordes than necessary. When a wave begins, your squad has to drop everything to defend your Crystal Bot - a defenseless robot companion that is your only means of opening locked doors to descend deeper into the station. If the bot gets destroyed, your run immediately ends.
Luckily, you have a lot of ways to defend the Crystal Bot. Each character can equip two guns and has a suite of class abilities they can activate to push, freeze, interrupt, and sometimes nuke large packs of enemies rushing towards the bot. As you explore, you’ll also collect schematics for building turrets that can help you cover your blind spots by dealing damage or providing additional utility, like coating the floor in goo to slow the monsters down.
Defending the bot from a single position, even one with multiple entrances, isn’t too difficult. But once you find a locked door, you’ll need to escort the slow-moving robot through the explored areas of the station to get there. This instantly triggers an endless wave that persists until the bot gets the door unlocked, but because you know this wave is coming, you can plan your route, set up defenses, and fully prepare for the battle before it starts.
Between the different classes, turrets, upgrades, and procedurally-generated map layouts, there’s an infinite number of ways to approach the big wave that signals the climax of every floor. You won’t be able to treat this like a normal twin-stick and shoot your way out of it, and if you don’t prepare for the wave, you’ll quickly get overrun. I found a lot of satisfaction in studying the map to find choke points and premium positions to set up defenses, and every time my bot made it to the locked door without taking any damage, I knew that all my planning had paid off.
My preview of Endless Dungeon took place at Amplitude’s cozy two-floor studio in Paris earlier this month, where studio head Romain de Waubert and creative director Jean-Maxime Moris explained that the idea for Endless Dungeon spawned from a late-development addition of multiplayer to Dungeon of the Endless. This was something that the community frequently asked for, and after implementing a basic version of it post-launch, the developers started thinking about how multiplayer could be built into the game from the ground up if they were ever to make a new version. Waubert says that Amplitude was founded with the rule to never make two games in the same series back to back in order to let ideas settle and give them time to reflect on past work. But after exploring the Endless Universe with Endless Space and Endless Legend and branching out into historical strategy with 2021’s Humankind, the studio decided to revisit Dungeon of the Endless to bring their co-op ambitions to life.
I was more ambivalent about co-op than any other aspect of Endless Dungeon during the preview, and I’m not yet convinced it’s the best way to experience the game. The emphasis on impactful decision making is in some ways at odds with the game’s design, and it’s easy to accidentally put your teammates in a bad position if you aren’t constantly communicating and planning together, which can make things tedious. Endless Dungeon has a lot of different resources for building turrets, researching upgrades, and buying equipment, and every single one of them is shared between all players.
It’s too easy for one player to get all the good weapons or spend all of your money on poor turret placement, leaving the rest of the crew with few options and little chance of success. It’s great there are heavy consequences to your choices, but checking in with your entire team before you open every single door just to make sure everyone’s ready if all hell breaks loose gets exhausting after a few floors. I generally prefer co-op games, but it might be more satisfying to go it alone here.
Waubert and Moris say they’re using the final months before launch to perfect the balance and dial in the risk vs. reward. Before even mentioning my concerns, they themselves brought up the fact that the randomized nature of Endless Dungeon makes it a difficult game to fine-tune. They’re confident adjustments can be made, and I’m interested to see how it shapes up.
The core gameplay, at least from a single-player perspective, is solid. I love the ebb and flow of the two distinct exploration and combat phases, and the potential for random waves adds a wonderful layer of tension that pervades the entire run. I found a lot of satisfaction in each floor I completed because I could see how the tools I invested in, the way I placed my defenses, and time I spent studying and understanding the map all factored into my success. The strategy adds so much to twin-stick action, which is a type of gameplay I usually find to be pretty dry in other games.
There’s a lot going on in Endless Dungeon, but don’t let the genre mash-up of it all deter you. It doesn’t take long to get a handle on the systems, and once you do, you’ll find a pretty compelling strategy game with plenty of exciting action beats too.
Next:Nobody Wins If E3 Fails
