Dungeon Crawlers HD Review

Who You Gonna Call?

I was scared that this would happen. I only recently stepped into the world of mobile gaming, and from the start I was dreading the day I would stumble upon a game with the pay-to-win business model, wondering not if, but when such a game would make its way to me. It’s a shame, because Dungeon Crawlers HD is a well-made game otherwise, one with a whimsical, if overly referential sense of humor, and a strategic combat system.

You start the game with three characters who make up your standard array of RPG classes: a melee tank, a healer, and a mage. Later a melee/thief hybrid joins your party. There isn’t much in the way of character building; you level your characters in a pre-determined, linear fashion, but the game encourages you to make use of the strengths and unique skills of each character in order to dispatch the variety of enemies. As you crawl this dungeon, you’ll come across banshees that stun you with their screams, giant knights that knock you across the room, and goblin mages that hit you with damaging status effects.

Old School Challenge

Dungeon Crawlers HD has your traditional turn-based battle system, but it’s well executed.  Knowing where to move on the grid, when to heal, and what attacks to use is imperative to your success, and it’s rewarding to die a few times in a fight before re-evaluating the situation and changing tactics accordingly. The challenge also comes from trying to get through each fight without any deaths, and the game encourages this. Once a character dies, he’s gone for the rest of the level, and you have to make a choice, is it worth doing the fight over again in an attempt to perfect it, or should you deal with having one less character for the rest of the level?

The boss fights are a nice change of pace when they occur, offering a twist on your standard turn-based battles. For example, an early one has you stop the flow of water from reaching a casket, as the boss endlessly re-spawns otherwise. You must do this while your tank character is hopelessly in love with the boss, and attacks you instead of her, an example of the game’s charming humor.

I only came across one bug while playing Dungeon Crawlers HD, but it was a large one. One fight had me make my way towards a goblin leader, but during this battle, the game stopped working after every turn. The enemies wouldn’t move and neither could I. I got around this by exiting the game after every turn and loading the save. You can imagine how tedious that was. Thankfully this was the only time the issue appeared, but it’s something that must be fixed in a later patch.

Who You Gonna Nickle and Dime?

Unfortunately, the positive qualities the game has are let down by its pay-to-win model. It’s easy to design a game in such a way to manipulate players into spending real money, and Dungeon Crawlers HD takes advantage of this. A developer can give the option to buy in-game gold with money, and use the gold to buy weapons and armor. Alternatively, you can rely on the gold you find in-game, but in three hours of playing, I only had enough gold to buy one weapon, thus making it impractical to rely on self-found gold. Therein lies the game’s biggest problem. The pay-to-win model affects the balance of the game, as it’s incredibly difficult to upgrade your characters without spending real cash, and since I refused to partake in this practice, I struggled with most fights.

Despite this, Dungeon Crawlers HD manages to be an enjoyable game, but its business model cannot be looked past. Although I still recommend it, I urge you to not buy any of the micro-transactions and to deal with the challenges that entails, because not only would you not be supporting an abhorrent business model, you’ll also be forced to strategize, thus making the battles fun and rewarding; a win/win situation.