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Jul 31, 2023

Endless Dungeon Review

Turrets and robots and bugs, oh my! Endless Dungeon looks messy at first glance. It takes dungeon crawler level design, tower defence mechanics, roguelike meta-progression, and twin-stick shooter

Turrets and robots and bugs, oh my!

Endless Dungeon looks messy at first glance. It takes dungeon crawler level design, tower defence mechanics, roguelike meta-progression, and twin-stick shooter controls all before blending them with class-based characters and looter shooter levels of randomisation. It looks messy because it is messy, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The aim of Endless Dungeon is to escort a mobile unit called the Crystal Bot, to the core of a near-dead spaceship that floats through space. This involves working your way through rooms, fighting off four different types of enemies, and dealing with ferocious bosses. To achieve this, you control various characters with different skills and strengths, a large number of guns, and loads of turrets that you must research and upgrade during each run. The total destruction of your squad or annihilation of the all-important Crystal Bot results in a loss and the squad getting resurrected back at the ship’s bar, where everyone seems to exist in a state of cruel limbo. After licking your wounds, you pull up your boots and get back out there.

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Getting to grips with it all was an uphill battle. It pulls no punches, even forcing a quick death in the short tutorial to set the stage. This emphasises the importance of every choice you make from the very beginning - each run has you making many choices, such as which weapons to buy, which resources to focus on accruing, and which turrets to research. Even the specific doors you open to explore the spaceship must be chosen carefully.

Opening too many too quickly will lead to you being attacked from too many angles or give your foes shortcuts to your precious Crystal Bot. Endless Dungeon is exceptionally good at making you second-guess yourself, and evokes a beautiful sense of tension - you’re almost always on some sort of timer, so you must act quickly. Even a hint of hesitation could spell your doom. Well, at least until you embark on the next run.

There’s a John Finnemore sketch about Sisyphus - by giving Sisyphus a tangible goal with set parameters that he gets better at each and every day, only for the goal to be made harder upon the next, Zeus accidentally creates the perfect conditions for human contentment. Completing Endless Dungeon is a Sisyphean task. While things are rough to start, eventually, it all starts to go smoother. You’ll learn which enemies to expect on each floor and start grabbing elemental weapons and turrets that they’re weak to, experiment with characters and pick a squad that you’re comfortable with, and even plan out your route to best avoid the most annoying enemies - definitely the Blurs, by the way, who can become invisible and invincible at random and ruin your carefully laid turret layouts.

The struggle to reach the first locked door becomes a breeze. You get better at proactively defending the Crystal Bot from the endless hordes that spew from spawners while it’s on the move, and you reach the second section. Eventually, you’ll reach the second floor. Then you’ll beat a boss or two. The sense of progression is palpable, and when strategies work, they’re born from multiple failures. A triumph you’ll remember even as you make more and more headway on your way to the core. It’s a great feeling, and one I’ll come to remember.

All the while, you’re accruing chips and scrap to be spent back at the bar. This forms the meta-progression aspect as you upgrade weapons and characters with tangible buffs and unlock new facilities. Scrap is rewarded from downed enemies and based on your performance in a run, and chips are found throughout the dungeon and rewarded for completing character quests. Crucially, you’ll almost always gain enough to purchase something at the end of each run, which keeps the ball rolling and prevents the game’s difficulty from feeling like an unclimbable wall.

Sadly, that wall is still incredibly high. Each run is a significant time investment, with each floor taking more than ten minutes on average. Add this to the fact that the game has you feeling stressed and on high alert basically all the time, and playing Endless Dungeon is a rather exhausting experience. This could be forgiven if it was varied enough to be interesting, but outside character and route choices, it isn’t. The random element is rarely sufficient to shake things up, and when it does, it’s because it’s handed you a devilish dungeon layout that makes the game feel unfair. After just a few hours, the early levels feel like a chore more than a challenge, and getting to the third and fourth levels - where things never really feel easy - takes far too long.

Boss fights are a key exception. Endless Dungeon has some of the most enjoyable boss encounters in the genre. One has you flipping the script and using your Crystal Bot offensively, another has you squaring up to a HAL-type AI, and another is a classic ‘massive space worm’ with endless hordes to complicate matters. They feel incredibly distinct and fresh, serving as wonderfully fun speed bumps in the middle of a run. The final boss, in comparison, feels a bit like a generic avalanche of bullshit designed to push your planning, skills, and resources to their limits, but that’s more a problem with the genre than this specific game.

I have a love/hate relationship with Endless Dungeon. When it’s good, it feels excellent. The early-game progression is incredibly satisfying, filling out quest logs and completing pages of upgrades is rewarding, and it looks and sounds sublime. On the other hand, the lengthy runs take a toll, and once you get into the late game, the rate of progression doesn’t cut it anymore. Suddenly, the time invested doesn’t match up with the strength of the upgrades you can acquire, and the game feels very much like a Sisyphean task as originally intended, a punishment.

Played on PC

A code was provided by the publisher.

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Brought up on mascot platformers and role-playing games from Japan, Ryan has been passionate about gaming for over two decades. As an editor, he gets to blend his love for writing with a lifelong hobby.When he's not working or gaming, he can usually be found baking, reading about pirates, or watching classic sitcoms. He also loves manta rays and has a master's degree in clinical psychology that he never intends to use.