Hack Slash Crawl

What in the hell makes dungeon crawling so addicting? I'll be damned if I know, but the 150+ hours I put into diablo 2 means that there must be something to it. The fighting, looting, the leveling is all so addictive. Hack Slash Crawl follows just about every trope that makes a hack and slash dungeon crawler a hack and slash dungeon crawler, namely its focus on; hacking, slashing, and dungeon crawling.

Hack Slash Crawl is a hack and slash dungeon crawler by Void. It aims to boil dungeon crawling down to its purest form; character creation, fighting enemies, fighting bosses, getting loot, and leveling up. The fighting is pretty simple, there are two attack types, melee and magic. To melee you click on an enemy, to cast magic you hit the magic quick key and the game pauses until you select the target of your spell. The combat really doesn't have much depth to it, the real depth instead coming from racial traits, equipment, and how you choose to approach the mobs.

When creating your character, you have a few important options. You have the name, which really doesn't matter, but I'm preferential to naming my vampires Vlad, my werewolves Witherfang, and other blatant ripoffs. After the name you have the race, and the class. The races are the biggest game changers, you naturally don't want to play a golem the same way you play a celestial, at least if you plan on surviving. It seems to me a few of the races are pretty underpowered as they only give initial spells, which may be nice around level one, but by level five that werewolf will outclass your Atlantean in every single way, and probably have a chance to get both of your racial spells too. Classes are less game changing, but still are designed to fit every play style. The are classes for melee and magic, healing and shielding, etc. So long as your class and race match your play style you should be fine. The last options you have available aren't initially accessible. The titles are only gained upon death, and you only receive one when you die. You can equip two at a time, and some of them are crazy powerful, but you only get access to them by doing extremely well.

On the looting system, I have to say it works decently, but it's pretty lackluster. All loot is random no matter whether it was obtained from a skeleton with a rusty sword, or Deathmaul the Destroyer, or even a chest. As a matter of fact, every level has exactly one chest, and one boss, but the equips you obtain from either of these is no different then that obtained from random monsters. As for the equips themselves, they vary wildly, and the usefulness of each piece will change depending on your play style.

I think the biggest problem the game has is that it tries to setup a short, simple, re-playable game, with little reason to replay it. That seems like it is the goal of the title system, but since you can only get one title per game play, and each game takes around five to ten minutes, with thirty two titles you are talking about 3+ hours to get them all, and that is assuming you know the requirements for each one. Other than that, the game pretty much becomes impossible to lose at past level 10. I can rush a room with a boss in it, and peel off all the enemies around me one by one while my regeneration keeps me alive forever.

Despite my gripes, at the core of it is a very good game. Its definitely not a game to be played for as long as it wants you to play it, but who cares, its still fun while it lasted, and the flagstaff series could certainly gain a lot from making use of the dungeon crawler elements in place. Hack Slash Crawl is definitely worthy of your time, but I wouldn't recommend grinding past the point where the game loses all its fun.

Flagstaff: Chapter One

So, you like dungeon crawling, but think that every single dungeon crawling game ever has been to complex? Well have I got a game for you, it features a four member party, each with a stunning 5(!) upgrades, and 3(!) different types of enemies to fight!

Flagstaff: Chapter One is a featured game on Kongregate by Joelesler. Its a typical dungeon crawler, though most of the parts of the genre, such as weapons, armor, loot, and exploration, have been stripped in order to make a very simple, streamlined dungeon crawler. You play as a party send to destroy a fairly typical skeleton infestation, in a fairly typical castle dungeon, at the behest of a very generic king, and what little story there is fleshes itself out along the way.

The game is controlled with the mouse, though you can use WASD or the arrow keys to scroll around the map. Each of the four party members starts out with one skill, and the ability to attack once a turn and move five squares. You can also buy upgrades to increase the amount of health you have, the amount of attacks per turn, amount of steps allotted per turn, and two new skills per party member. Not that any of it is essential mind you, because this game is easy enough that I'm pretty sure a kindergartner could beat the game in under a half hour. Never once did get below 4/10, and I was able to heal them on my turn and kill whatever enemies caused the damage as well. The AI is pretty dim, as the enemies wont even focus fire on one target, choosing instead to damage whoever is closest to them, even if they are able to hit a weaker character who is farther off. In fact this is one of the game's biggest flaws, since the game lacks any other important tactical choices, you figure the combat would at least attempt to challenge the player, but it merely throws small nuisances at the party from floor to floor, which takes away most of the redeeming value the combat would have provided.

On the issue of graphics, I really do like the art designs of all the characters and tiles. The art is fairly simple, but all of the isometric faces are drawn correctly, and present a nice clean look. It all looks quite attractive in motion, with all the basic attacks and movement being fully animated. The only problem I noticed was that many of the special moves lacked distinct animations.

Flagstaff looks like its shaping up to be an interesting series. As the game stands at chapter one, I wouldn't recommend it because it is far too barebones and presents no challenge. The game is supposed to be a series though, and maybe the next one will be better, who knows?

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?

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.