The Dungeon Beneath is a rogue-lite auto battler. Your hero and up to a team of four go into a randomized dungeon and have to beat floor after floor full of monsters. Auto battler sure sounds like you have to do nothing, but you won’t go deep into the dungeon without tactical thinking.
Your hero is your main character. If he dies, the run ends. Your goal is to beat the enemy’s hero. If one of your units dies, they’ll recover after the battle.
Tactical Thinking
Like I said before, tactical thinking is a must-have competence in the dungeon. Each turn, you have to place your units on the battlefield. Be careful. Moving a unit will make them exhausted, which means they can’t attack this turn. You want to prevent moving your units first but sometimes it’s needed.
Units automatically attack other units in the opposite lane. If no unit is in that lane, they’ll attack the hero. Since there are six fields in total, and you can’t have more than four units in your team, this will eventually happen if you don’t move your units. Remember: your hero does not recover health after a battle. You need to find or buy potions for that.
Items and potions
In the dungeon, you can find items and potions. Potions recover the health of your hero OR give EXP to your units. Each level your units gain attack, health, or their ability gets stronger. The max level is 3. Your hero can’t level up.
Items can be equipped either by your hero or units. Some items are for fighters only, some for mages only, and a few are just for your hero. Most items give you bonus stats like +2 health, +8 speed, or +1 damage/-1 health. But some items let you recover 1 health each turn, or gain 1 armor each turn.
Aside from items, you can find artifacts in chests. Artifacts are pretty strong, so they are rare to find.
Many units have special abilities. Some summon creatures at the start of the battle, recover the health of allies, or increase the power of an ally for one turn. Some units and most heroes also have inexhaustible, letting them attack even after moving the lane.
Music
One thing really stood out to me in this game: the music. It’s magnificent. The sound effects are like from a ’90s dungeon crawler and the music combined with the aesthetics of the game just gives you nostalgic vibes.
Typical for a rogue-lite, you gain EXP after a run and level up. Each level you unlock new items, creatures, heroes, or artifacts which you can then find in a new run. The problem is one run can take 10 to 60 minutes. Let’s say you had a short run and died early. You earn 80 EXP and level up, unlocking something new. That’s nice and all. But if you have a 60-minute run and gain 330 EXP, you just get the EXP needed ’til reaching the next unlock, even if 330 EXP would be more than enough to get two new levels. I don’t know if that’s a bug right now or intended, but in both cases this just feels unsatisfying.
Summary
Beating the game lets you unlock NG+. Beating NG+ unlocks NG++ and so on. But a bug prevents you from unlocking NG+ right now. After beating the game, getting the achievement, the game stops working and you have to ALT+F4 which results in a progress loss of that run. At least that’s what happened in my case. I don’t know if that problem persists every time you beat the game or if I was unlucky. Either way, hopefully, that will be patched since it’s game-breaking in a rogue-lite.
All in all, The Dungeon Beneath is a really good rogue-lite giving you just the right feeling of “Just one more run!”. It can be addictive, even after beating the game, since there is a lot more to discover and unlock if it wasn’t for that game-breaking bug right now. If they fix that, you are good to go and should definitely buy it!
Links
Get The Dungeon Beneath ➜ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1359120/The_Dungeon_Beneath/
Chat with MGN on Discord ➜ https://discord.gg/mbJtKqB