Five Feels: Endless Dungeon

The feedback is poor

This game has a fundamental feedback problem.

It contaminates a lot of features of the game.

The first one, I felt instantly – combat.

Shooting enemies feels floaty. It feels weak & unresponsive.

It doesn’t feel like i’m shooting my way through an armada of aliens.

Hell, shooting a nail at a balloon gives better feedback through the “pop!” and erruption of air.

Here, I see soft particle effects, flashing effects and enemies dissapearing.

There’s no knockback or real illustration of the impact you cause.

Rather than killing enemies. It feels like I’m just making them no longer exist in this artificial world.

Then there’s the abilities, which honestly, I forgot even existed.

There’s even abilities referred to as ‘ultimates’.

Which must be short for ultimately dissapointing.

I felt compelled to use none.

Infact, I didn’t even work out what half of them did.

I tried hovering in the UI, which gave me no info.

So I just switched off to them.

There’s then the issue of the currencies, which feel like monopoly money.

Again, I tried to hover in the UI and got no further info.

The whole building section of this game just felt lackluster.

So, it makes sense that the currencies, which are used to take advantage of building, also felt meaningless.

If we combine all these things, it makes sense that the entire game has no proper explanation to the player.

We’re trapped on an ancient spacestation…

We need to escape..

We do that by getting to the center to turn the core on, or something?

So, we need to go through all these floors to get there..

But when we die, we just respawn anyway, so nothing really matters.

There’s like this weird overexplanation here to make this work.

When the original was simply – ‘Crash landed on an alien planet and the ship has been wedged into an underground facility. Escape.’

1 of those I can explain in a sentence. The other is a jumbling of sentences, and I still don’t fully grasp it.

It doesn’t make me feel like a hero

My previous point ties right into this one:

I don’t feel like a hero

I don’t feel strong, I don’t feel powerful or like anything i’m doing truly matters.

The hilarious part is, during my (albeit short) time playing, I felt little-to-no challenge.

But it’s less about difficulty and more about juice and feel.

When i’m playing Vampire Survivors or Destiny 2 and I see the actual feedback, the eruption of enemies because of my blows:

I feel strong

Games can be a lot of smoke & mirrors.

Because the back end is ugly.

Logic and calculations.

True and false states.

That’s what it all boils down to.

But as game developers, we get to make those monotonous logic and calculations feel like something.

Endless Dungeon, in my opinion, doesn’t do enough to make you feel special.

I often felt like a delivery driver when playing this.

Moving from door to door, hoping something more exciting waited behind the next one.

It rarely did.

Then we come to the crystal bot.

The point of this game is there’s a crystal bot who powers the station.

Your job is to find the elevator, escort it and power the elevator to proceed to the next floor.

The problem is: he’s stupid.

One of my playthroughs saw me find a rare upgrade.

When you do – the game dictates that you must escort the crystal bot to the upgrade.

He then picks it up and goes back to his original resting spot.

During this, you’ll be set upon by enemies.

So you must defend the bot.

This particular time, I had a path to my next elevator door.

Along the same path as the upgrade.

What happened frustrated me.

The bot got up, moved to the upgrade, then back to his slot, then back up and along the same path to the elevator.

Combine this with lackluster combat and the bot moving slow as fuck.

I wasn’t impressed.

I had another incident where notification was sent to tell me:

“The enemy swarm is destroying your factory!”

The factory that was generating some sort of currency for me.

I had no idea where it was, it definitely wasn’t in sight.

I also had a loose idea of what the factory was actually providing for me.

So, I left it.

With the obvious expectation being I’d rush to defend it.

But I felt no such desire, due to not knowing what it actually provides me and not having a clue if I’d even make it in time anyway.

How do we fix this in a game like Endless Dungeon? Honestly, I don’t know, that’s part of the problem.

The end of the Gardens floor sums it up.

I’d put my turrets down, the wave came, and the turrets did all the work.

That’s meant to be the good bit.

I never saw any of it, because I was on the other side of the map stood next to the crystal bot while it spent 40 seconds unlocking a door.

Tower defence games are top down for a reason.

Watching your stuff work is the whole point, and this one puts you where you can’t watch.

I see game designers, not a world or a game

I loved playing Dungeon of the Endless, but it’s a niche genre.

It’s a strange mix of rts meets tower defence and dungeon crawling.

Endless Dungeon feels like an attempt to take that appeal and bring it to a larger market.

When I said in my previous feel that I don’t know how to fix it.

I wonder if this blend can work.

In my opinion, not well in this state.

The game doesn’t want to compromise either side of the genre.

I wants to be a fast paced fun twin-stick shooter.

But it also wants to be a strategic tower defence.

In the end, to me, it does neither.

I see a bunch of systems and gimmicks thrown together in a soup to require some sort of behaviour from the player.

That’s what I mean when I see designers, not the game.

I see doors that look like any other door, but with some special lock to restrict access.

I see a crystal bot shoehorned in to make building turrets desirable and allow an escort mechanic in the twin-stick shooter area.

The funny part is, this same bot was in the original game and I questioned nothing.

It fit and felt natural and fluid there.

Here, nothing truly does.

Exploring feels like a chore and escorting the bot feels like one too.

But that literally is the objective of the game.

And I think it feels that way because of the first feel I pointed out here.

Nothing has weight. Nothing feels satisfying.

I think most of my complaints will ultimately circle back to that.

Strip away all the systems and graphics and ask ‘does the moment to moment shooting feel fun?’

No, it doesn’t.

It felt like a chore

Enemies aren’t interesting.

And that sucks, given how much I love the Endless universe.

I really wanted to enjoy this game.

But each enemy encountered is that meme of kid trying to fit the square into the round hole or something on the toy.

There’s 5 (I think) weapon types.

They all feel the same.

But they do different damage types.

Fire kills bugs.

Electric kills droids.

Match one with the other.

There’s no challenge or anything to make you think mid-run.

Once you figure out the weakness, you just grab that weapon depending on who you encounter.

It’s just match the colours.

Not very fitting of the ‘survive in the mysterious ancient space station’ fantasy.

A lack of things to chase

What I’ve noticed during this game examination journey, is having multiple tiers of objectives is very powerful.

A main-line objective, and some smaller ones.

Let’s look at some examples:

1. World of Warcraft: Main – Get to level 60. Small – get a certain weapon, get a mount, get X gold, do X dungeon, get X spell, win a battleground
2. FTL: Main – beat the last boss. Small – try the laser gun, unlock a new ship, unlock a new ship layout, try the boarding enemy ship build.
3. Total War: Main – Conquer all enemies. Small – Get X unit, unlock a technology, complete quests, make alliances.

A lot of the time, small side objectives are player driven, not dictated.

Quests that are optional and give a nice incentive.

Rather than being mandatory to finishing a run.

Endless Dungeon was weak here.

Unlockables weren’t paraded infront of me.

I often use the analogy of:

Being in a toy shop as a kid and seeing all the toys my parents’ can’t afford.

So then you want to figure out a way to get them.

Here, the equivalent is showing me characters I can’t play as and telling me why I want to play as them.

And yet, Endless Dungeon does have quests for each character when you play as them.

They just feel weak and uninspiring.

Encouraging me to do things that I’m already doing.

Like the first quest you encounter is ‘unlock 20 doors’.

Unlocking doors is fundamental to the game.

You can’t possibly play it without unlocking doors.

It’s like playing an open world RPG and getting a quest to walk 10 miles.

You’re doing it anyway.

Again, it’s not thought provoking or inspiring.