Grommit_Draco Dungeon Crowley Early Access
Dungeon Crowley is an early access game available on Steam. Dungeon Crowley is developed and published by Animvs Game Studios. It is, as of writing, in beta version 0.31.38.
When you start, you are in a small room. There is nothing telling you why you are here, no indication as to what you need to do. Just you and a random room. Once you have finished looking around the room, you see stairs leading up to a night time forest. Searching around at the beginning, there is only one path to take. That path leads you to a town.
Once you start the maze of buildings and the monsters therein, the game has truly begun. I equate the maze-like nature of the game to Wolfenstein 3D. To me it almost felt that Dungeon Crowley was a spiritual successor to it. The houses can be either giant or one room. All houses in the beginning level have two floors; however, access to the second floor may not exist in the smaller buildings.
You have three modes of fighting: ranged, melee, and magic. Each mode has different weapons available to it. At this time, the ranged weapons are a bow, a crossbow, and a javelin. Melee weapons include several one-handed weapons, but only one two-handed weapon for now. Magic weapons range from staffs to wands with different variations of each. You can build your character however you want, whether it’s a straight build or a mixture. But having a decent ranged attack is almost a must.
Character leveling is point based. Every level you earn gives you a point to place in one of the three attributes. There is strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Strength equates to melee, dexterity to ranged attacks, and intelligence for magic.
Your weapons and armour take durability damage, which can be repaired by repair tokens. Repair tokens, healing potions, and compass tokens are obtained by breaking objects in the environment. The game does notify you about items being low durability, but frankly, you will have switched weapons and armour so frequently you will almost never have to worry. Once you have reached higher levels and decided on how you are building your character, that is when you will need them more. As you can see from the above picture, I have 40 repair tokens and 19 compass tokens.
The game does provide magical weapons and armour that have different abilities. Some increase the experience earned, while others will provide higher health/will power caps. The items in purple have to be researched in order to learn their properties. This requires placing them into your hot bar. It is an interesting take on identifying items.
Combat in the game is a bit clunky at best. With attacks going through walls while others get blocked by invisible barriers. You can block with every weapon. If you time it right, you get a flawless block, giving you push back on the enemies and at times damaging them. Combat is very simple hack and slash. Mixing in ranged and magic varies only the distance at which the enemies get hit.
The enemy variety is decent. With unique enemies for each different level. Just recently I came across a mimic and I have to admit, it made me jump!
Overall, the game is decent in early access, but does need improvement going forward. Very playable.
