The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians – Enhanced Edition
Introduction :
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is an RPG Dungeon Crawler game, in First Person View, inspired by classics like Dungeon Master™ and Might & Magic®, but featuring a modern tactical combat based on the triptych “tank/damage dealer/healer” mechanism coupled with the threat & aggro system and an active pause.
Story :
You’re a newly employed guard of a prison deep inside a dungeon. The night of your arrival, strange things happen and when you wake up in the morning, all prisoners have escaped amidst chaos. The warden wisely decides to leave the dungeon as quickly as possible, while tasking you to run after the escaping prisoners. You then assemble your team and venture into the mysterious dungeon.
A Call For Adventure :
Enter a big, massive dungeon, full of danger, mystery and secrets.
Fight your way through hordes of enemies and powerful creatures.
Explore intricate corridors, underground palaces, mines fallen into oblivion and evil crypts.
Solve puzzles, avoid deadly traps, uncover hidden passages, and keep your bearing through mazes & hallways.
Character Building :
You’ll take command of a party of 4 guardians. Each guardian comes with a set of spells & abilities, with new ones appearing over the course of the adventure.
For each new level reached, the guardians get a point to use in their talent trees, allowing them to reinforce their abilities or gain new powers.
There are 4 classes to choose from: the warrior, the healer, the mage & the rogue. Each class has 3 specializations represented by a talent tree, and each specialization comes with its own set of abilities. So you have 12 base build-ups. In addition, your guardians can choose freely to spend their talent points in any of the 3 specializations of their class, allowing for even more varied set-ups.
The dungeon is filled with loot: epic armors, legendary weapons and mystical, magical items. Often when you kill a group of enemies, they’ll drop a random piece of equipment that one of your guardians can use, raising more and more of their powers.
Evolved Combat System :
The combat is focused on the triptych “tank/damage dealer/healer” mechanism, coupled with an exciting threat mechanism: your healer’s spells directly threaten all the enemies nearby, and thus your tank must use his abilities to attract their wrath and protect the healer. The tank must then be able to mitigate a lot of the enemy damage using his defensive skills.
Your last 2 guardians will be the damage dealers, trying to kill the enemies as fast as possible, while they’re busy with the tank.
All guardians get a lot of abilities and not only will using the right one at the right moment be essential to your party’s survival, but also combining different abilities in sequence to maximize their efficiency will be required to vanquish your strongest foes.
It sounds like a lot, but fortunately the game comes with an active pause: you can pause the game whenever you feel like it, check everything, queue the next abilities for your guardians, and then resume the game.
You don’t like tanks, or you don’t like pausing the game? No problem, just lower the game difficulty, and you’ll be able to play without a real tank or pausing. You can precisely tune the difficulty at any time during your exploration.
Unlike old-school FPV Dungeon Crawlers, you don’t have to strafe-turn-strafe-turn all the time in Dungeon Guardians. Your tank comes with serious defensive skills (armor, dodge & parry) that let him handle most of the enemy attacks, as long as the healer backs him up. So most fights are done while standing your ground.
However, occasionally your whole party will have to dodge some extremely powerful enemy attacks, usually by walking back, so you’ll still need some moving reflexes and awareness of your surroundings during the fights.
Built-in Map editor & Modding :
The game comes with a full featured map editor, letting you create your own dungeons. The basics are very simple, but a bit of learning will be required to handle the more advanced puzzle mechanisms.
Additionally, with the Modding SDK, you’ll be able to fine-tune the existing enemies, classes, specializations, abilities, talents, gear, and enchantments, and with a bit of dedication you should be able to add your own, and even add sound FX or music.
Game Features :
- 4-character Party
- Grid-based movement : your party moves 1 square at the time, and turns by a quarter
- First person view
- 4 classes, 12 specializations
- 5 playable races : human, dwarf, elf, dark elf, halfling
- Active pause (ie: you can pause the game and still queue commands for your party members), and numerous optional auto-pauses
- 25-50 hours of gameplay, depending on your own skills and the difficulty settings
- 20 bosses, each with an unique strategy
- 100 kinds of creatures (including variations)
- Puzzles (the few ones required to finish the game are easy to solve)
- A lot of tactical combat
- Built-in Map Editor & Modding support
Game Discussion
Steam User 11
This game feels feels so close to my (probably nostalgia influenced) memories of Eye of the Beholder. I haven't gotten very far into it because of my need to look for secret buttons, but what I've done so far has been really fun.
Steam User 5
An enjoyably game but it doesn't quite scratch the Dungeon Master itch. There's a simplicity in the maps and a lack of puzzles which makes other games like Grimrock stand out so much more. That said, there's a lot to enjoy about the game if you want to tromp around a dungeon.
Steam User 2
SHORT REVIEW
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is an extremely competent grid based dungeon-crawler. It inevitably gets compared to Legend of Grimrock but the games are actually different in several respects.
PLOT: The plot (which is never a strong point of dungeon crawlers) is exactly as you would expect it to find it, i.e. pretty weak. Its certainly not the worst offender in this area but its not the best either.
COMBAT: The combat system is "real-time with pauses". Most abilities operate on cool-down timers, so it's up to you to rotate through them. The thing I don't like is that the party composition is very much forced upon you by the game and is Tank, Healer and 2 DPS characters with very little opportunity to play anything different. There is a wide range of difficulty setting to suit all abilities and you can change the difficulty at any time, even in the middle of a combat.
GRAPHICS & SOUND: The graphics and sound are very good. The graphics are nice although a couple of the monsters could have done with a little more work and the sound is more than adequate for the game. This is also a 10 year old game at the time of writing, it certainly doesn't look that old but it is an “Enhanced Edition” so may have been upgraded at some point since launch.
REPLAY VALUE: Limited which is about par for the course for this type of game. I often say you should play through twice. The first play through being “blind” and the second play through using a guide to try and find the secrets you missed the first time round. With this there aren't a lot of secret areas and once you find the 2nd map on a level it shows you areas you have yet to explore so there is no need for the second play through.
ISSUES AND BUGS: The game runs “straight out of the box” and appears to be bug free.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND TRADING CARDS: Full integration with the Steam platform.
VALUE FOR MONEY: A bit difficult to give a detailed answer but I would probably put this in the “wait for a discount in a sale” category. It's about 10 years old at the time of writing and comes round at 60-70% off in sales. I also bought this as part of a “Grid Based Dungeon Crawling Bundle” on Stream which is a pretty good offer if dungeon crawlers are your thing.
LONG REVIEW
The game inevitably gets compared to Legend of Grimrock. This is actually a very unfortunate comparison. Okay, both games are Grid Based Dungeon Crawlers but that is where the similarity ends! This uses a “real time with pause” combat system where you cycle through abilities with cool-down timers, there is absolute no aspect of the “Square Dance” style of combat common in Legend of Grimrock and many other similar games. The other main difference is in puzzles and hidden areas. Puzzles are generally limited to one “puzzle room” on each level which are optional areas and not necessary to finish the game. The game has relatively few hidden areas and the presence any areas you haven't explored is revealed when you find the 2nd map on each level.
I don't know what it would look like at lower settings but it is relativity light on resources and even on my 9 year old PC defaults to the highest settings which are a Resolution of 3840 x 2160 and Graphics Quality “Fantastic”. The one thing they could have done and wouldn't have been a big job is to voice the characters, its probability only a couple of hundred lines at most.
As I have said above this can be bought as part of a “Grid Based Dungeon Crawling Bundle” on Stream. This is worth taking a look at if dungeon crawlers are your thing. If you already have some of the games in the bundle it can be pretty cheap as a “complete your collection” purchase. Its also nice that you buy it once and get the whole game. There are no devious cash grabs where parts of the game are locked behind additional purchases and no other DLC either.
Steam User 3
I really LOVE this game. So far Its my favourite dungeon crawler beside Monsters Den. The story is quite weak, the ending abrupt, but the game is very strategical, the variety of classes increases the replayablity - Ive needed around 100 hours for my first playthrough -, and I like the way the classes, their skills and skill trees are designed like in the older World of Warcraft games. Its actually a mini world of warcraft singeplayer game. High amount of action, not as many riddles - what I find much better. The dungeoncreater feature is nice to have, but quite coomplicated and too time-consuming.
I wished there was a kind of infinite dungeon mode, like in monsters den, where you can grind through dungeons as long as you want, since, as I said, making your own dungeons takes just too much time for it, and there are no downloadable custom dungeons from another players that I could have found. The player could also enjoy the max level character longer this way. This would be a great content for a buyable DLC, and I really hope that a 2nd game will be released some day, since I had a LOT of fun with this game. Weak story, strong gameplay with tank, dps and healer roles.
P.s. for any new players: i'd recommend to download some mods from the workshop right in the beginning, like the rewamp of the necromancer, they make the game much better. Unfortunately I found this mod just when I had finished the game with my necromancer.
Steam User 1
This game deserves much more attention and praise than it gets. Very unique dungeon crawler with amazing QoL improvements over older games in the genre.
The free mouse looking around is a big plus even though it's a tile based crawler. The combat is oddly more like BG1/BG2 with pause + real-time combat.
I really hope the team behind this makes more games like this.
Steam User 1
Great fun game, works quite well IF you run it under PROTON Experimental.
Don't even touch protonge for this, as it can freeze up etc, but overall, this is a great game once you get it working properly...
It's like one of these old style dungeon bashes that is turn based and doesn't rush you, you can pause, give your character instructions and continue, i like that.
Steam User 2
I'm not a huge fan of dungeon-crawlers, but I saw a video of this one and it won me over. The realtime-with-pause-at-will combat convinced me to try it. You can take as much time as you want to set up your strategy, change it if you're not satisfied, then let it go and pause whenever you want to change it all again if you're not happy. For dummies like me, that's a dream scenario. I can actually "get (reasonably) gud" without having to replay battles over and over. Combine that with the walkthrough available here on Steam (because I'm not good at finding all the secrets either), and this is essentially as good as an old-school dungeon crawler can get. I'm also learning how these games work better in general so I can go back after I finish and try tackling one of the ones that did me in before again. A big thumbs up.