Feel Logging Dump: Endless Dungeon

Bad feels

It goes on waaay too long: I managed to find my way to the elevator. Great! Run over! Let’s see what I won. Roguelite games typically follow this modern approach: Run > win > go home > rewards > restart. Not here, onto the next floor. Combine this end result with the rest of these bad feels, I didn’t continue my run.

Shooting doesn’t feel good:I don’t feel strong, it doesn’t feel impactful, the juice isn’t there. Constant blue balls waiting for something to make me feel almighty. The combat feedback felt like it didn’t recieve the attention it should’ve.

Enemies don’t react when I hit them: This is pretty much the complaint above, but it felt meaningful enough to mention twice. They don’t react or register the blow. It does the minimum to tell me i’m causing damage, but it doesn’t feel juicy.

There’s too much shit going on: Honestly the UI is a mess, for reference, I’m playing on an ultrawide. It doesn’t feel made for that. But even with a regular sized monitor, the UI feels like it would still bother me. Things aren’t intuitively designed and spread all across the 4 corners of the screen. 4 currencies, my squad and hp, my abiltiies, turret slots, quests, wave indicators, map, etc. All shouting at me while i’m trying to aim. Imagine giving a twin stick shooter the micromanagement UI of an RTS – that’s this game.

I couldn’t work out what my abilities do: Hovered over my ultimate, nothing. Even when I did try using them, I couldn’t always work out what they were doing. Eventually, I forgot they were even there.

Most rooms are empty: A lot of rooms were empty in the original too, but you got valuable resources. Here, resources feel a lot less strategic, since you can just shoot your way to victory anyway. In the original game, the emphasis was on your strategic placement, since you had no direct aiming or control over your heroes. Only their placement and the defences you chose to place. Here, there was nothing to make me care about opening doors, besides getting out.

Opening a door costs me and pays nothing I can see: I open a door, the danger meter speeds up. Whatever I got for it doesn’t show anywhere, but I move closer to getting a wave of enemies attacking. Feels like a tax for nothing.

The real time wave timing:I’m taking my time to interact with the strategic part of the game. I’m looking around at my turret options, placing them and figuring out what I want to unlock next from my factory buildings. The game doesn’t care. The wave timer is real time, not based on your actions. So, in the midst of my planning, I get attacked by an enemy wave. There’s no down time to make those planning decisions.

I let my factory die and didn’t even think about it:Not because I weighed it up and decided it wasn’t worth it. Because there was too much going on to weigh anything up. Couldn’t be arsed running across the map so I left it.

Floor two gave me nothing new to do it with:Same job, same tools, no new toy. Nothing that made me want the next lap.

Dying felt like nothing:Didn’t know if I was meant to die on my first run. Didn’t know if I’d kept anything. No idea if any of it counted.

I don’t know what I’m working towards:Meta goals? More characters? I don’t even know who the characters are.

Why does the crystal bot exist:Why do I have to move it. Why does moving it unlock things. DotE did the same thing and it never bothered me once, but here it feels shoehorned in to make an escort mechanic.

The gates just keep stacking:Locked doors, then a door that needs a lever, then an extra special door that needs the bot, then escort the bot to some other bit. At some point you stop seeing a station and start seeing the designer.

I had to escort the bot to an upgrade instead of just carrying it over:Walk the bot across so it can pick the thing up, then walk it back to its platform. Why can I not just pick the upgrade up and hand it to it.

Then I walked the exact same path again two minutes later:Same route, this time to unlock a door. That’s when it clicked that the escorting isn’t a mechanic, it’s just distance.

I stood at a door for 40 seconds doing absolutely nothing:Bot unlocking, me watching it unlock. I spent the whole 40 seconds thinking about how boring the game is. I already had my turrets set up waaay off the screen somewhere else. I could hear them firing, I saw no enemies. I just waited for the crystal bot to do it’s thing. Then “mission complete!” … wooo…

My turrets did all the work and I couldn’t see any of it:Watching your defences hold the line should be the best bit of a tower defence game. I was over at the door with the bot. Never saw a second of it.

“Open 20 doors” isn’t a quest:This is the first quest I got. It’s a counter stuck onto something I was going to do anyway. In Hades a run objective actually changes what I pick. This one just watched me. It didn’t feel meaningful or give me any thought. This was a task that is fundamental to even playing the game. It’s kinda like getting a quest in WoW to walk a certain amount of steps. Makes no sense.