Darkest Dungeon®

NOTE: For me, a normal game should have 3 stars, and a perfect, ultra-replayable game, 5 stars. I only review after completing the game. This game starts very interesting, you manage a team of characters with several types and skills, and a small village with several features. The missions are pretty hard, you have a feeling of "wow, that was close". Some characters need resting one week, and maybe you need him, so a dilema starts. This was fun, the firsts 20h. However, once you have a big team (mid game), you may switch your mindset to, lets try a difficult level, or lets grind. In the first case, you have all the cards to die miserabely. With the second mindset the missions will stop to becoming a challenge soon. You always do the same. The more advanced is the game, the less variety of artifacts and strategies you need to use, except for some bosses. Once you reach the end of the game, the final boss is really easy, much easier than their previous bosses and challenges. The graphics are really nice, and pretty dynamics. The music is awesome but from time to time you will need to stop it, it's always the same. And the ambience is great. The control is very good with mouse/keyboard, but not perfect with gamepad. After seeing that addons only add dungeons and more kind of heroes, I prefered do not purchase them: I wanted to finish the game with all its internal achivements, not extend the grinding. Purchase only if you love TBS+management games and you don't mind grinding... a lot! I finished it in 104 hours in my first game run.

The game is fun, if your idea of fun is being constantly bullied and beaten by an invisible and unstoppable force (rng) that will constantly do anything to render your characters unplayable. On top of that it's insanely grindy. You'll find yourself doing the same thing over and over: - acquire new heroes - upgrade stuff in the hamlet - go in one of the dungeons - get back to the hamlet - decide what broken heroes are worthy being repaired and which will be sent away - rinse and repeat. That's all you get to do in the gameplay. Practically the game is all about spending your whole loot to build the characters you need to get the loot in the first place, which will inevitably die, sooner or later, forcing you to start over to create the same character almost from scratch. After a few hours, played in a couple of days, I was stressed, frustrated and bored out of my mind.

It's not a bad game, but it is a game for a very specific type of player and it has very little interest in being accessible to others. This is a game for obsessive optimisers and wiki-readers; a game about optimal choices. When you first play it is a disgustingly hard game, because you just don't know how the game systems work. Once you know how the systems work, there is no real challenge at all, not even the RNG, because even the bad rolls are a known quantity that you've accounted for. This makes for a deeply frustrating experience, because the game does almost nothing to teach you about its systems, to the point where you simply cannot learn them from within the game. It's also important to point out that this is not a "Souls like" RPG. Souls games can have so groan-inducing deaths, but you just go back to the bonfire and try again. DD will wipe hours and hours of play with little warning and tell you to just deal with it. Souls-like punish overconfidence by making you take 100 tries to kill Ornstein and Smough, but they don't punish you by making you start the whole game over. If you are the kind of person who enjoyed gaming back in the days of Terror From The Deep, you probably will like DD. But the old XCOMs were games made when you didn't have instant access to the best strats. If you want to be good at DD, just read the wiki, and at that point the game plays itself.

The game is basically a Yumina the Ethernal in dark fantasy setting. If you’ve experience with the game before Darkest Dungeon was released, you’d notice both the games share the front row back row different skills, have four characters, all have four skills, and are dungeon crawlers that use random dungeons. DD doesn’t have interruption skills nor immediate (de)buffs however, and is not story based. In Darkest Dungeon you’re likely to lose characters, even the best players would still lose a few due to the way the game is set up, certain characters are no longer useable after certain stages. Often you’ll try to push the game progress in a very random rolled game by sacrificing a few characters. It’s not a bad mix, except the game balance is not very well. Enemies like leather armor bandits start out with prot 15, while all players’ characters whether wearing robe, or plate armor, it doesn’t matter, everyone starts with 0. Enemies are going to get to protection 80 around level 3 dungeons, which means either you have the dlc (which has a character that can ignore defense), or use dot damages that will last for a long time. There are a few skills that decrease enemy protection but not enough to make the 80 to a reasonable number. The balance is pretty horrid, and it gets worse at level 5 dungeons and endgame dungeon. Most settlements require to grind resources to build so you can use certain feature like heroes of might and magic/ disciples, but resource is very low so you’ll need to grind lots. Enemies are also going to have cheat rolls. It’s easy to set up a character that has critical chance 30%~50% that has attack all enemies or heal players, then you’ll notice the character actually performs less criticals than enemies. The game also forbids high level characters going to lower level dungeons, so you cannot grind then try it later. Lots of bosses are going to be reused so just experience level 1 and 3 dungeons then call it a quit wouldn’t be bad idea.

Lovecraftian dungeon delver rouglike, RNG heavy combat, randomly generated dungeons. What's not to like? UNDECIDED * minimal plot. A few sentenced before boss encounters * higher difficulties don't actually add difficulty, but are more grindy PRO * nice cosmic horror atmosphere * good looking, comic book style * nice sound effects * satisfying gameplay loop (hire guys, prepare for delve, dungeoneering, send survivors to heal, repeat) * permadeath guarantees high tension * inventory is simple, but meaningful * color of madness DLC adds fun enemies * unique mechanics (lighting and torches, madness) CONTRA * very grindy, especially with Crimson Court * defeat the same boss multiple times "mechanic" is very cheap * gameplay conflict: hiring high level adventurers is cheaper than healing old guards who you built from level one. Optimal way seems to be to intentionally kill off characters with quirks on suicide runs, and hire new guys * gameplay doesn't have enough depth to support the additional grind of higher difficulties. Easiest (radiant) seems to be the way to go * Crimson court DLC adds even more grind to the base game * Shieldbreaker DLC is a shameless cash grab TIPS * build stagecoach to maximum * build upgrades which give you high level adventures * high level new hires will arrive with unlocked gear/ability sets, saving you thousands of gold * if interested, play in radiant mode to have the least possible grind, and don't buy Crimson Court Good for what it is, but keep in mind that this is a rougelike delver, not an RPG, not a tactics game. Can get repeatative, but before it happens, you will have a good time with it.