Dungeon Developer

Dungeon developer is a dungeon crawling game, with a twist. You play as the owner of a small town with a large dungeon below it. Your mission is to dig down and build the dungeon for random adventurers to explore and loot. On the 15th and final level, you must kill a dragon in order to beat the game. The game in and of itself is incredibly easy, the difficulty comes in when the game tries to pressure you to complete it in under 25 days for a platinum medal, or 35 days for a gold. While I missed platinum, I managed to secure gold with a days days to spare, and there really isnt much challenge involved once you understand all the of the mechanics.

The game is rather novel in that rather than playing some evil dungeon master, or a group of brave heroes in a dungeon, you essentially play a merchant who wishes to milk both the dungeon and the heroes of every last cent you can. You dig the dungeon, resulting in the heroes killing the monsters for gold which you get a fraction of, and the monsters damage the players, who pay you for healing services. Your ultimate goal is to have the heroes hurt, but not dead, and killing as many things as possible so they can level up, dive deeper, and bring you more money and items to sell back to them. So long as you aren't racing the clock, you can sit back, and make whatever crazy dungeon you want, and watch as the number of heroes multiplies until its a mad dash of every hero trying to get a kill before the three others behind him can.

There are five classes, four of them having their own unique attribute, but surprisingly, they are all built for the same type of self reliant one on one combat. Sure the cleric heals himself every once in a while, and the mage does higher damage, but all of the classes except the rogue are essentially the same thing with minor tweaks. The rogue gets two interesting feats that the other four lack, as he can both disarm traps on contact, and automatically score random criticals. Overall, I think a more cooperative, party type system where every class has a group benefit would have made the game a lot more interesting.

The main thing that bugs me about this game is how little you actually play or decide the outcome of what happens. You make the paths and choose the items, sure, but you don't choose which hero types visit, which path any one of them goes down, who takes lead and nabs 75% of the experience, whether or not the hero should stop fighting with a sliver of health left, or anything of the sort. If the random number generator decides that the lead rogue is going to head down the straight and narrow path to the next floor while the three people behind him are going to take the alternative path while all the traps, there really isn't a whole lot you can do. Its kind of like playing texas hold 'em, skilled play does help quite a bit, but luck always rules the day.

All-in-all, its a fun game, and a good game to play if you happen to be busy doing something else simultaneously. You can set your equips, add whats needs to be added to your dungeon, and do something else while it play itself for a couple minutes.