Dungeon Souls

Dungeon Souls is a roguelike action rpg that tries to overcome many problems that cripples actual rogue-likes. The overall idea is great to mix Risk of Rain loot with a universe/layout inspired of Hero Siege and Hammerwatch. It's fast paced. Colorful and well made on many aspects like the fact that your hero is trapped into a dungeon and dies in desperate tries to escape it. This leads to an interesting progression system where you need to collect gold, materials and receipe to forge weapons for your heroes. You can equip some during your runs or even pay for permanent buffs to tailor your character according to your play style.

For starters, as the name implies, this is a souls-like so it doesn't want to 'hold your hand'. That translates to explaining absolutely nothing to you, even how to purchase upgrades or skills. I had 3 runs before I realized you could purchase your skills during the run and use gold upgrade stats in the character select. You also can't pause when looking at your inventory or adding bonus points after leveling. Thankfully, you can at least pause the game proper when you go into the menu. Each floor is also on a timer before an invincible monster shows up. As the title implies there is a lot of grinding involved. Passive upgrades and equipment all cost lots of gold and materials and getting better weapons is vital to clearing floors bosses. This ibecame particularly frustrating when I quick saved after a boss with 90k gold and came back an hour later only to find the quick save didn't save and I lost ALL of my progress. I don't know if this is intentional or a bug, but if you quick save you can't start a new run and it seems you can't close the game so what's the point? After that massive lost of time I found little reason to continue.

As of v1.0.5.5 (May2018): I bought this for local Co-Op and have had nothing but issues. Local Co-Op needs a lot of work. You cannot play the game with two gamecontrollers. One player has to use the KB/Mouse the 2nd can use gamecontroller#1 Controller support in general is pretty bad. Game was designed for mouse/KB, mouse to aim/attack and keyboard for movement. gamecontroller support is clunky at best. notes: - game starts in KB mode whether or not gamecontroller is connected must enable gamecontroller under options, then exit and controller must be connected before relaunch - also enable autoaim otherwise very hard to aim as it tries to use the right-stick for mouse aiming local co-op notes: - it's a vert-split screen, which is fine, but it exaggerates the problems with targeting with the right-sitck - Can't use two controllers for local coop for this game. Player 1 will always be mouse/KB Player 2 will be gamecontroller1. You can use JoyToKey to map gamecontroller#2 to the common KB commands for the game, so player 1 can use gamecontroller#2 and player 2 can use gamecontroller#1, but it is a workaround at best and still does not control well. (My example mappings don't fit in the review, but are here -- https://pastebin.com/bJEUTNcQ) I am kinda worried if they game will ever be playable for local co-op with two controllers as On their steam blog they posted "Dungeon Souls Development Update" [https://steamcommunity.com/games/383230/announcements/detail/3276808089038633790] which basically states that they are "reorganizing" and development will be stalled. So in short, if you are going to buy this as a couch co-op, PLEASE DON'T (at least as of v1.0.5.5) If you are buying it for a single player Mouse/KB crawler, then great -- but there are a lot of those out there.

It took me a cool minute to get the handle on what the real style of the game was, as I didn't read any lore or pay attention to any help/tutorial stuff. So because of that, when the Redeemer came and kept killing me, I got super frustrated because I couldn't seem to kill it. After realizing that you can't, the real style of the game sort of clicked with me and then it became crazy addictive. Every level is intense because you're racing to against the clock to optimize between discovery, items, and experience. The character depth is pretty cool, and not being too far into the game yet, I haven't really tapped into the forging much, but having found some recipes, it's a very neat mechanic. Coupling that with the Ranks that each character gains--also there are unlockable characters which is a nice addition--makes them a little stronger over time which helps. On a random side note, I have the Logitech G910 keyboard and the colors change according to various triggers in the game! Each character classes changes it on selection, and it goes dark when you're really low health for added difficulty and suspense. There are several other cases where it changes, but I'll leave those for you to discover :) Very cool feature.