The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians Review

Do you enjoy squirming around a dark damp dungeon? Maybe instead of a house you live in a cave with giant rats. If this is the case, then The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians might just be the game for you.

When I was a young whipper snapper back in the nineties, I was hooked on dungeon crawlers as we like to call them. I started playing the ‘The Eye of the Beholder’ Game series back on the Amiga. I fell in love with the genre. You will find yourself in a first person point of view and are faced with crawling through dark damp dungeons and such; Trying to work your way out. I hadn’t actually heard anything about this game till it popped up out of nowhere. The most recent game of this type I have played in recent years was the ‘Legend of Grimrock’. A pretty decent game that I have reviewed in the past. Anyway, we are here to talk about The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians. You will take command of a party of four guardians, with new ones appearing during your epic adventure.  Will Dungeon Guardians hold up against other successful games of this type? Let’s find out.

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is a pretty surprising game. You can tell the game has been designed by someone with a love for dungeon crawlers. The first task at hand is to choose your class from the four that are available, each with twelve specialisations. You have five playable races, human, dwarf, elf, dark elf and Halflings.  You have a whopping twenty-five to fifty hours of gameplay to be had. After you have chosen your character you can then proceed to the actual game.

My very first impression was it is definably not as good-looking as the likes of the Grimrock series. The graphics are not the worst in the world however, but they are pretty decent. Just not as detailed as many people would like possibly The game was developed and written using the Unity 3D engine. This is quickly becoming the most popular engine for small game studios and developers to use. It’s a very powerful game engine and a lot can be done with it. I actually quite liked the detail that The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians has.

As you proceed through the labyrinth of corridors and dark, damp rooms you will come to like the art and details scattered around the place. I have to admit; like anyone I do like good graphics that we have all become accustomed to in triple A titles; but I always put graphics second. Gameplay is the key to a good game, and this game certainly does a good job at fulfilling that space. You get the usual generic trio of allies to play with. You have a tank, two damage dealers and the usual healer to keep you all in tip-top condition. You need to choose which attack or defence to use as you face your enemies. As per usual you will find the first thirty minutes or so pretty basic. You will be taught how to play. What each character can do, and how to use them.

The combat in this game is very well-balanced. Not a single character seems to have an advantage over the other. As you play along, this is where the game really starts to show its colours. You have a deep story to dive into. And you meet a fair few different enemies to fight against. I am not going to mention anything about the story as that is for you to find out. This game is surprisingly really good fun. I did find myself dying a lot. Especially at the beginning, but you will soon learn how to hold up better. The deeper you go in this game the more and more it starts to impress you. The sound effects are nice and you get a good feeling of being in a dungeon beating up increasingly nasty and powerful enemies.

One thing I would love to see that I haven’t seen in a RPG Dungeon Crawler yet, would be some co-op gameplay. Maybe this has been done already in other games, but I haven’t been playing them all, so I could be wrong. If you could have a team of four people battling through the game together with each person playing each different class would be quite good. However, I can see why this may be quite hard in this type of game. The whole idea is you have to learn how to balance each class’s actions to do well. However, you can play together in many other RPG’s and I would quite like to see this in a dungeon crawler. I guess in a small team it can be very hard to decide what to put into a game. It is very easy to have all these things you would love and dream about, but actually implementing them is a long and somewhat tough task. If you would like to read a bit about what the developer went through to bring us this game, you can find his writings of what he went through to bring us this game on his main site. You can easily find this if you search for the game in your favourite search engine. One brilliant thing is its open to the modding community, so I am excited to see what mods come along. This will certainly extend the shelf life of this game.

So to finish things off. I would definitely recommend The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians to someone that enjoys a good RPG dungeon crawler then this is definitely worth looking at. I really enjoyed this game and cannot recommend it enough, and for the very low price of under twenty quid. So what are you waiting for, run along and buy it. I always enjoy supporting small developer. Especially when they do a good job.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.