One More Dungeon

Developer: Stately Snail
Publisher: Ratalaika Games S.L.
Developed by the Russian studio Stately Snail and published by Ratalaika Games, One More Dungeon is a blend of first-person shooter and dungeon crawler with roguelike elements and procedural generated levels. Playing as a nameless hero, you’ll fight your way down a dungeon to find and destroy an obelisk which is being used by evil forces to invade our world. Adventure through dark rooms and perilous corridors to find your way down, level after level, fighting hordes of enemies in this challenging – and rewarding – game that keeps you always engaged for one more level. Grab your weapons and follow us in this review, adventurer.

What do you do?

One More Dungeon is a dungeon crawler with first-person shooter elements (or would it be a first-person shooter with dungeon crawler elements?). Armed with a melee weapon and a magical staff, you explore dungeons, fight hordes of enemies, increasing your score and collect loot to improve your chances of survival as you descend more and more through procedural generated levels in this dungeon. In each level you must find a stronger enemy that carries a seal used to unlock the door that leads you to the next floor. By collecting special coins, you can buy new weapons in shops randomly scattered through levels to make your survival until the last floor viable.

 What is Good?

• Sound: Good quality retro music creates the perfect atmosphere for the game, combining mystery and suspense at every new door opened or every corner you turn. Always stay alert because you never know what waits for you and the music plays an important role in building this feeling.
• Customization: By slaying enemies during the gameplay, you increase your score. With this score, you can buy some mutators at beginning of your next adventure that spice your gameplay. Options include extra health options, start with more HP, half enemy HP, making things easier, or limit your view range, make you constantly lose health or have a max HP of 1, making things incredibly more challenging. You can combine any two of these mutators at the beginning of any new game. All I ask you is: are you up for the challenge?
• Gameplay: The combat in One More Dungeon is the icing on the cake. You have at your disposal a melee weapon and a ranged one (a magical staff with elemental alignment) that uses crystals as ammunition (the FPS part of the mix). Your ammunition is divided into three elements, represented by the color of these crystals: red for fire, blue for ice and green for poison. There are other magical staves that use combinations of these elements, like Ice and poison creating wind or the three of them creating dirt. Your melee weapons can also have this elemental alignment, but they don’t cost you crystals to be used.

Mixed Feelings

• Graphics: One More Dungeon has simple pixel graphics that get more and more interesting as you descend through the dungeon. At the first levels, you have stone walls that soon give place to wooden walls, ice caves and more. But looking at them, all I can think is Mojang’s Minecraft is playing D&D with his friends. I’m not saying it is bad: it does a decent job with colorful spells, scenarios and but some enemies are hard to decipher: Is that green fella a goblin or a dog? Still, wells, barrels and dead enemies spin as you walk around them, like in (really) old games like Duke Nukem 3D.
• Exploration: Although you have a map at your disposal (accessible by pressing X button), exploration can become tiresome after some time, even though it has a major role in the gameplay. I got constantly lost in levels, believing I had fully explored an area, just to discover that I missed a small but important part of the map at the beginning of the level. So always pay attention to not leave any corner of the room or any part of the map unexplored.
• Inventory: Inventory management is a little bit confusing during the first hours of gameplay. You access it by pressing Y and can designate the items to each one of the d-pad directions, plus LB and RB. But this management and designation are a little confusing.

What is Bad?

• Story: Although we know what motivates our adventure, this isn’t something the game tells us. It is always a step down to me when the game doesn’t give you a clue about your motivations.
• Shops: The stores in One More Dungeon annoyed me in three different ways: first of all, who is that NPC who runs the store? Why is he helping you instead of aiding in the invasion? Second, they aren’t always present. In some of my sessions, I ran through 3 or 4 levels without them showing up. And last, the items at the store could show their status, so there was no risk of you buying something that won’t fit your strategy.

One More Dungeon [Score: 74/100] With roguelike elements, challenging, procedural generated levels and engaging gameplay, One More Dungeon is a delicious adventure with great replay value. Be you searching for an original FPS or a dungeon crawler, the game is a good call for both genres.