Infinity Dungeon Review

Infinity Dungeon is an auto-scrolling dungeon crawler from Zabob Studio, and as the name indicates, there is no shortage of dungeons to plunder. The premise is that a “young indie warrior couple,” a swordsman and a mage, get married. They’re happy, but poor, so they raid dungeons in order to get rich. In an interesting twist on the fantasy genre, the only goal is to make as much money as possible. There’s no maiden to save or evil tyrant to defeat—just floor after floor of monsters unfortunate enough to contain gold coins and diamonds in their stomachs.

In each level, you’ll fight through a hallway of enemies until you meet the boss at the end. The swordsman, always in front, attacks all enemies automatically on contact. The heroes also have special moves (long and short range power swings with the sword, or flame and healing spells for the mage) which burn up magic points (MP). If your health (HP) reaches zero, the mage opens a portal to transport you out of the dungeon to safety.

Infinity’s levels, while simplistic, are nicely rendered in colorful scrolling scenes, and the endless hordes of enemies you fight are surprisingly imaginative. In addition to the walking skeletons or bears you can  find in any fantasy game, for example, you face dinosaur skeletons, squid, and even Santa Claus. Despite the limitations of a phone-sized screen and an 8-bit aesthetic, every living thing is depicted in loving detail. Monsters and themes eventually start to repeat themselves, but only after a hundred levels.

Infinity’s music is unremarkable and generic. The sound effects, of which there are only two—one for strikes and one for healing and mining—lose their novelty after the first twenty levels or so, especially if you collect gold frequently. It’s not too much of a sticking point, though, as playing with the sound off doesn’t detract from the whimsical enemies.

In addition to the money you make in the dungeons, a significant source of your wealth comes from your dwarf pals. They stay above, in the upper part of a dungeon, and mine for treasure while you’re down below, killing skeletons and giant ghosts. With every dungeon cleared, another dwarf is added to your party. The money you make is either used to increase the rate at which the dwarves mine, or spent on improving your pair of avatar’s weapons and abilities. Some skills and items can only be purchased with diamonds, which are obtained in combat. A shortcut to more diamonds is to try Zabob Studio’s other games, or you can bypass that entirely and just pay for them. Frankly, paying real money to advance in a game where the only objective is to make fake money feels a little weird.

One frustrating feature of the game is that instead of gradually increasing in difficulty, the first nine levels of a floor are easy, while the tenth is extremely difficult, meaning lots of grinding to improve your stats. No matter how much you upgrade those stats, however, MP stays fixed at 150 points, with the cost of all spells fixed at 25. This means MP is spent much faster than it is replaced. Even though you can increase HP, the rate at which you can heal yourself doesn’t change.  Another minor annoyance is that the game has a tendency to occasionally crash.  However, it always happened in the main menu, never in the middle of a level, so it wasn’t a deal breaker.

Because there is no threat of dying or losing progress, the stakes never feel very high. And, since the goal is to make money, which you do constantly (and presumably ad infinitum) there is no real sense of accomplishment. True, you do level up and eventually add new weapons, but those new weapons are used to increase your ability to make money, so that you can level up again, so that you can make money, and on and on. Nevertheless, the game isn’t called High Stakes Quest, it’s called Infinity Dungeon, and it certainly delivers. For the price of about four attempts on an arcade machine, you can have limitless dungeons at your fingertips. So grab your sword: there are monsters to slay.