Great Dungeon in the Sky

Great Dungeon in the sky is another one of those dungeon crawling games with a twist (I seriously think straightforward dungeon crawling games are outnumbered by their meta companions at this point), where you take control of an 8 bit character, and crawl through dungeons killing other 8 bit characters using one to three special powers. The shining features and core of the game is the fact that when you kill a monster it gets added to your list of characters you can play as. This means that while you may start out as a bland warrior, if you manage to kill a cat or an astronaut, you will gain the ability to play as either a cat or astronaut.

The amount of characters in the game is incredible, and while many feel exactly the same (gender swaps, race swaps for the same class), no character plays like a cube, or an angel for example. You start out with a mere 32 characters unlocked, but all in all there are well over 300 characters.

                                                     Manticores, now with 50% more stealth!

The characters themselves don't really matter much, its just a graphic. The skills and traits are what really make them unique. There are over 200 unique skills, each assigned to between 1-10 characters, and each character in turn, can have up to 3 skills. There are skills to speed you up, make explosions, shoot guns, create ropes, turn invisible, jump high, summon an ally, cast spells and generally anything you could think possible. The most notable flaw in this system is that every skill has a cool down timer, and that every skill shares the same cool down time bar. This means that a lot of the more interesting attacks are worthless, because in the time it would take for a spell like blind to cool down, you could have swung 5 times and killed the monster. Other than that minor flaw, the skill system is quite impressive.

The main goal of the game is to slay four dragons, then fight the final boss, which is a lot easier than it sounds. In fact, you'll probably spend more time dicking around with characters like the red cube and the cucco than you will actually doing the quest. Collecting the characters in a pokemon-esque manner is more of the point of the game though, as the main quest is easily doable in about 15 minutes. There is a benefit to doing the main quest though, because every time it's completed you get one free monster unlock, which is nice as about half of the monsters aren't prone to spawning often, while others like goblins occur about every other level.

Great Dungeon in the Sky is a short and cute game where you try to kill everything in sight just for the purposes of seeing what it does, and really, what more could in want in a game?