Endless Dungeon is a sci-fi roguelike with the look and feel of a space western mixed with a pinch of Guardians of the Galaxy. Sega’s latest comes packed with distinct heroes and a gameplay that follows the traditional staple of repeat runs to improve your permanent abilities, bringing a flavor of twin-stick shooter and tower defense but with enough twists to make it feel like its own epic.

The Bottomless Dungeon

It may come as a surprise to some players, but Endless Dungeon is a new chapter from a long-running series mostly comprised of strategy games such as Dungeon of the Endless and Endless Space. There’s no need, however, to have played any of the previous titles to enjoy Endless Dungeon to its fullest, as this is pretty much a standalone chapter with just enough lore to get you in the mood for a brand-new story.

Everything begins when your team of unwilling heroes crash into an abandoned space station and swiftly discover that the only way out of there is by reaching its core. Predictably, it sits deep down within the station, with various floors to cross. Stages are procedurally generated, so you can expect different layouts, enemy generator locations, and other elements for each run.

The exciting part about Endless Dungeon is that it plays its tower defense card in a clever way, shifting between protecting your tower – which is in fact a metallic arachnid known as crystal bot – and escorting it to the pod that opens the next zone. The bot is your only shot at survival, and when it is finally destroyed by the relentless enemy waves, it’s time for you to begrudgingly return to the saloon, which is the fancy name for the station where all the shipwrecked heroes spend time, drink, and tell tall tales about their performances. In other words, it’s the hub where you can find new heroes, unlock and upgrade chips and weapon mods, discover new districts to explore, and more.

Choosing the two starting heroes for each dive is one of the most complicated challenges. The rate at which you unlock them is quite pleasing, making the selection diverse and appealing not too far into the adventure. Combining characters in an effective manner is part of the process, finding out if Fassie makes a better team with support specialist Shroom, or if long-ranged Blaze would be a better option. Experimentation will give you the right answers, and it gets even better when a slot for a third hero is unlocked, going from a duo to a trio for the later challenges.

Endless Dungeon is the rare kind of cooperative game that works nicely as a solo game too. In the case of a lone player, you can switch between characters at will, taking control over the one that may feel best suited to a certain challenge. However, AI doesn’t perform nearly as badly as in some games of the ilk, and you have a basic function to order it to follow or stay in a certain spot. It’s fun to work as a team with a human or the AI, the gameplay flows nicely and is chaotic enough, never becoming hard to read among all the blasts and relentless units. Naturally, the game shines if you coordinate your efforts with another player, but it holds its ground if you’re playing by yourself.

Endless Turrets

The core mechanics of Endless Dungeon revolve around the gathering of resources and use of turrets. There are three resources to keep an eye out for: science, food, and industry. Production is door-based, which is a technical way of saying that each time you open a door into a new room, the specified amount of resources is added to your total count. Often, you’ll find resource generators that you can use to produce more of the resource you desire, but these gadgets are an enticing target for the enemy critters, so you must try to defend them as well.

Apart from the raw firepower of your hero team, you can build turrets in designated tiles. You don’t have complete freedom to place them wherever you desire, which is a shame, meaning that you are limited both in range and combinations and there’s nearly not enough potential for imagination and tactics. You can unlock new tower types by spending some resources, and these are upgradeable, ramping up your game for the challenges ahead. There are rooms that just happen to be almost pitch black, and in these cases you can’t place turrets until you spend an item to light up the area and make it fully functional again. You can also find some shards that the crystal bot can mine to result in upgrades such as faster movement or better defense, but again these are optional and you must consider the risk of wrecking a run before ordering your bot to get going.

Some commands such as starting research or ordering the crystal bot to get a move on trigger an enemy wave, reminding you to be fully prepared when you do so. Turrets carefully placed in strategic locations, best weapons equipped, unique ability and ultimate hopefully charged, and medkit at the ready.

The action is intense, bullets and beams flying everywhere, there’s a lot going on and not enough time to take care of everything, just like the game should be. It plays fast, heroes move with a confident speed, but I couldn’t help notice the somewhat robotic running animation even for the human characters, almost like you have these fast-forward walking frames instead of a natural, flowing movement. However, my biggest concern is the lack of a dash or dodge action, which means that apart from the occasional speed upgrade, all your movement is summed up into this steady pace, with no option for a last-second save of any kind.

Endless Dungeon clearly achieves what it aims to do. Here we have a game that takes a couple of tried and tested genres and puts an original spin into them, with the result both oozing familiarity and novelty, successfully breaking free from the occasional stiffness of tower defense and roguelike gameplay. Cleverly balancing moments of tactics and all-out action, this is a game best enjoyed alongside a couple of players, but it manages to be a fun romp even on your own, as you try to reach the core and finally escape back to normality.

Score: 8/10

Pros:

• Clever hybrid of tower defense and roguelike
• Diverse selection of heroes
• Original resource system
• Exciting action gameplay, both solo and cooperative

Cons:

• Limitations to turret placement
• Awkward running animations

Endless Dungeon review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.