Guild of Dungeoneering Ultimate Edition

I would give this 3.5 stars, or "above average." The gameplay here is not well-balanced or deep enough for extensive play. There are also petty annoyances that creep in if you play it too often. But, it's great for breaks while working on a project. The premise is that you send a hero into a dungeon to fulfill a quest. A hero starts a quest at level one with no equipment. You add rooms to the dungeon and treasure amd enemies in the rooms. By defeating enemies, the character will collect leveled equipment and slightly improve their stats and fullfill whatever the objective of the quest is. The main point of the game is the combat, which is done by playing cards from your deck of abilities. Typically, the enemy plays a card, then you play one, and the cards are applied in that order. There are a few abilities unique to each character class (all obtained on level one), but most of the ability cards come from equipment. (This make all leveled characters play similarly, unfortunately.) This process is fairly fun in short doses, and I do recommend it if you are looking for casual turn-based combat. But, there are annoyances: 1. Classes become obsolete as you complete the easier quests. Characters have one one aspect of progression, which is random and can be either good or bad. 2. Bugs: Quests can become unsolvable due to card-draw randomness. The game tends to freeze on long quests. 3. Certain classes are very fragile, and loading screens are very long, so you may be in for a long series of 1. getting killed in one hit, 2. being taunted by the narrator, 3. sitting through a loading screen 4. I found that there was one class that outperformed all other classes for almost all quest types. This killed the sense of fun for me. I wish the game were better balanced. But, the game IS strangely addictive. There are a huge assortment of enemies, and all the classes have a lot of flavor. It's...just fun to discover all the content.

It starts out fun but it becomes tedious and frustrating. The dungeons get harder but the characters never get any better. Character progress and items are reset after every dungeon. Only a handful of dungeons are unlocked at a time so you're forced to repeatedly play the same dungeons over again and over again. After playing the same dungeons over and over again, the game just isn't fun any more.

Pro: The ultimate version fits the DLC in where they make sense in the story. Con: It's got more bugs, additional grinding for money if you're stuck (there's now a maximum on how effective your grinding can be without restarting the level), bugs that cause you to lose your turn (always allow everything to load before doing anything at all, even though it's very slow), and at least one game-breaking bug near the end of the game. Stick with the original if you've got it.

The classic version was fun, but they appear to have dropped support for it so hard that, unless you bought the DLCs beforehand, you can't use them with it anymore and, even if you did, you need to use innoextract to manually unpack and install them because the DLC installers can't find the Zip-provided Classic version extra. I brought this up with GOG, but they said the devs have final say, and I brought it up with the devs, but they pointed me at Galaxy and then went silent after I mentioned I'd solved it in a "just for me, as a highly technical user" way by innoextract-ing the DLC installers and dropping the relevant files into what came out of the Zip.

Guild of Dungeoneering has its charms with a soundtrack that is pleasant to the ears with gameplay that took a little getting used to. Yes, the RNG is punishing, but once you figure out how the game mechanics work, the game isn't so bad and I actually found the dungeons to be relatively balanced. The mistake I tended to make is that I rush through the dungeons to finish the quest ASAP. Bad move. I'll actually try to card the adventurer away from the quest targets and give the character a chance to build up some gear and use the favors to burn off cards I don't want for the rest of the run. That alone made things much easier as I was able to thin out the card deck to the way I wanted it. I would give it 3.5 to 4 stars (dev gets benfit of the doubt since it's an indy dev) Pros: - sound track is enjoyable - gameplay simple to learn, tricky to master Cons: - can feel repetitive and grindy - can feel unduly punishing until the game mechanics are fully understood Observations: - don't get too attached to character levels. They reset after each run - don't get attached to your characters either. Many will die - don't get attached to a character class. The are tiers of character classes and you're meant to take the upgraded tiers as time goes on - you have no direct control over where your toon navigates too next. You can only attemp to influence it - play this in short bursts; nothing wrong with a game you play for 15 to 30 minutes at a time