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 5
Fun up until the point you need to look up a guide to discover you missed a key. Then you discover the problem is an elite dropped the key. Problem is you moved alot during the fight and you have no idea where you killed them. You didn't hear the key drop after the fight because there is no audio sound effect attached too keys dropping. You also can't carry a light source with you like every other game in this genre. It's a perfect recipe to waste a bunch of a person's time for no reason what so ever which is why i'm giving this game a big fat thumbs down until it is fixed. I can respect that the developers designed the game this way because they don't want you to just be able to run past enemies grab keys and run away all the time but there are 2 easy ways this could be fixed. Add a audio cue too the keys when they drop or even better just have the key automatically go into the player's inventory after they kill an enemy holding it.
The developer quickly responded with a solution too my problem. There is an accessibility option you can toggle on to highlight all objects on the ground if you are having trouble finding a drop you missed.
Steam User 2
9/10 game! Amazing result for the small team that made it happen. Really innovative in a lot of areas. Thank you making this great game. This is such a well-designed game and I can tell you put in a lot of effort and love into it.
* How I learned about the game *
I really loved Legend of Grimrock 1 and 2, and was hungering for more games of that style. I googled and multiple people recommended this game, so I bought it... probably a while back, and it's been sitting in my library. I looked through my backlog a week ago and found this game, and had to give it a spin.
* Things I loved *
1. Each level had some new spin / mechanic to it.
2. The puzzle rooms were unique and different for each level, and they didn't take too long to complete so it wasn't frustrating even when I got stuck.
3. Combat was different and I was looking forward to leveling up.
4. The banters between the party members. I know it's not Baldur's Gate 2 level of banters and it's set, but it really made it feel like the party members were chatting with each other and are real people.
5. The humor! It wasn't too much and was just right.
* Things I wish were different *
1. Didn't love the lighting to the game. It was just so dark at times.
2. Not having the map was fun for a bit, but then at later levels, the map was almost toward the end. I know some players love exploring, but I am one of those that easily gets lost and it was frustrating at times.
3. There was a lot more combat than needed toward the later levels (13+?) (I have the "less combat" turned on).
4. Would have preferred a bit more itemization. It's not the main focus of the game, but unique and sets a la Diablo 2 would be fun (obviously not to that scale). I think having sets in set locations would reward exploration and finding secrets even more.
5. Would have liked more variation on the level tileset.
6. I felt like the game had enough of the story to make me interested while not being too heavy, but it sort of falls flat at the end because nothing is explained. I was expecting the warden to show up at some point, or at least his body. I expected the end of the treasure hunt to be something different but it was just a vampire and he didn't really explain much. The young emperor having two bodies is... I read in another thread you wanted to leave it as a mystery but it just feels like a lost moment. Why did he become this corrupted thing was also never explained. I would have liked a bit more lore and story, especially since we were picking up notes and reading them already. Something like short snippets to piece together the story would have been great, or pieces of lore (what is the Empire? Who are the barbarians?)
7. Would have loved a NG+ to let me keep leveling.
8. The final fight was a bit of a letdown. I leveled all the way to 20 and the game is making me lose levels. It made the fight more challenging, yes, but it felt like the game was punishing me and taking my toys away. If this had happened for one of the four phases, that would have been unique. Happening to all 4 and having it get worse was quite frustrating.
9. Unique art for epic / legendary gear would make them look even more stand out.
10. It felt a bit dragged on toward the end. The sweet spot for me would have been ended at level 15 or so. It's not that the later levels were boring, but they weren't unique enough and the game had really gone on for a while.
11. Some sort of shop or "token exchange for rewards" by the Dungeon Guardian would be great. It feels like something Halaster Blackcloak would do to Undermountain, so I can see the Dungeon Guardian doing it too.
* Looking forward *
Unfortunately, the game didn't seem to have gotten enough attention and thus sales. The chance of an expansion or 2 seems low. I honestly don't know why because I thought this is a great game. I would have loved a sequel.
In the chance there isn't, is it possible to release mod tools? Might be difficult and time consuming to build something if these weren't planned from the start.
Please let me know how I can know what you're working on next, even if it's not a sequel or a similar genre to this game. I would love to support your future work!
Steam User 2
Kick ass party management game. Feels like a classic, plays super modern. Tons of customization if you don't like how the game is set up in the first place. I personally love the damage meters, it feels like a great way of gauging progress.
Steam User 2
Easily one of the best square-based dungeon crawlers. This one is a bit outside the box in a good way from combat, to QoL, to UI. It's a general improvement across the board from the ole formula. Runs and looks good to.
Steam User 2
This is one of the best "modern: 3d grid based dungeon crawlers out there that I enjoyed , next to Grimlock. The QOL featrures makes it an easy choice to keep on playing and enjoying it.
The game has a smooth grid -based movement system, allowing you to look up and down, left and right feeling like a first person game (like skyrim) but obviously restricted to the grid based movement. Enemies are also restricted to grid-based movement. I like the movement in this game better than compared to grimlock 1 and 2.
Second is the auto mapping only when you find a map on the level. This is a nice blend of "not holding hand" without the map and being rewarded for finding it.
The hot bar keyed real time combat took me a little while to get used to , as some of the elements remind me of MMORPG's using the same . There are DPS meters, Threat meters which add a layer of statistical detail making the game more engaging and tactical .
Your party has conversations about what is going on in the game, so it makes you the player, informed of what is happening
The dungeon crawling is appearing to be slow and methodical, which i like.
I have not seen much variety in puzzles, traps or enemy types as of yet in the first few hours in the game, so I will report back.
Pros:
Difficulty adjustments
MMO type combat with active pause features.
One box for inventory to share with all crew.
Unlocked 1st person camera that works while moving at the same time.
Map unlocks once you find a map.
UI adjustments
Cons:
Not a lot of immersive/interactive elements at this time (i hope that changes the deeper i get in the game)
Steam User 1
I loved this game even though i'm a newcomer of this genre. If you have played and liked Legend of Grimrock, you'll probably like this one too. They are in the same vein. Only flaw of the game i can think of is it's a little bit long for it's own good
Steam User 1
Really solid dungeon crawler. Smooth UI, complex dungeons, a large cast of monsters, clever puzzles all set this game a step above most of its peers, but what's really unique is the combat system.
Basically, we've done away with roaming creatures or random encounters for a more turn based rotational system that's aided with an ingame pause. As you kill creatures and level up you gain talent points that can further bolster your characters with new abilities. If you've played WoW you'll recognise the trees, as they're heavily inspired from them. That's not a bad thing, because the talent trees in WoW were really well done. It's something you'll either love or hate, but you can set the combat to be insignificant so you can focus on the exploration instead if you like.
As for exploration, every floor gets two maps, the first which is relatively easy to find, shows where you've been, and the second uncovers the entire map, allowing you to hunt down those missing secrets. I'd have liked the uncovering map to have been a default -- it possibly is in the options, but I like to punish myself -- but it's a nice touch. Most levels can be navigated with memory, bar a couple full of teleporters which just gave me a headache. But again, it goes to show the amount of love that's gone into crafting unique settings and areas when so many would just draw lines around a 30 x 30 square and call it a day.
My only niggle is the sheer amount of loot -- literally every monster drops something. Again, this will either be a plus or a minus depending on your tastes, but I often found that it slowed the game down drastically having to double check after every battle whether the item dropped was an upgrade, sidegrade, or trash. But that's a really small complaint on a game I've dumped almost 50 hours into going on the hardest difficulty first.
If you like dungeon crawlers and RPG's this is something you can't pass up. If you're just into dungeon crawler's this is still a worthy addition to any library. Was really impressed with this.