The Dungeon Crawler

Pixel Brady: The Dungeon Crawler is a dungeon crawler by Brady, developer of the highly story-driven action-adventure Dance of the Immortals. This game was created as a side-project to his simulation game Colonist, which focuses on establishing a colony from just a group of people. In Dungeon Crawler, however, the game focuses on hack-n-slash dungeon crawling, with a bit of roguelike influences to bring depth into the game. Gameplay trumps story in this game (in fact there is no story at all), and your objective is just to get stronger, and defeat the final boss at the end.




Rating: 3/10

+ Simple mechanics
+ Novel combat
- Repetitive dungeons
- Lack of polish

The game is presented as simply as possible. You are given a choice of two classes – Guardians or Warriors – each of which have their inherent strengths and weaknesses. You control one hero in an action-based combat system, hacking and slashing through various levels of monsters and collecting loot. The movement is 8-directional and pixel perfect, which may alienate some players, but for me it was a nice touch. The HUD consisted of an HP bar and XP bar on the top-left, and a bar with a book icon on the top-right. I still don’t know what that’s for, but I assume it wasn’t used in the final version.



The game has simple mechanics, with nice popup text as you collect items/kill monsters. I found that the dungeons were a tad repetitive, though, since there wasn’t enough variation to make them interesting. The equipment and loot sometimes didn’t make sense, since sometimes it made you almost impervious to monster’s attacks. I feel that the combat system wasn’t fully fleshed out, due to the lack of important things, like a skill system. The game could also have done with a little bit more polish regarding the core mechanics, and a bit more thinking out how each will affect the player’s adventure.


Rating: 4/10

+ satisfactory mapping
+ pop-up text when looting/killing
- inconsistent framerate/lag
- lighting system bug

The game’s visuals were OK. RTP graphics were used, which I generally don’t mind, since some of my favourite games are made in RTP (Hero’s Realm, EMDE!2, etc), but generally I felt that dungeons needed more ornaments, or were lacking purposeful design. That said, the general layout of the map was unobtrusive to player movement, and you felt free to move as you pleased. The 8-directional movement certainly helped this. The text that popped up whenever you killed a monster, or grabbed loot, was fancy and very pretty to look at.



The framerate dropped considerably in areas where the lighting system was put into effect. When masses of fireballs are displayed on the screen at once, especially in later levels, it leads to a lot of lag on my middle-end PC. The animations for combat were pretty to look at, but there wasn’t a great visual variety of graphics, and I found myself not interesting in exploring after about the 3rd floor. The radius of light in dark caves is extremely small, making it hard to find your way through caves, even when you just barge through the enemies. There were also times when I would die in a dark cave, and be resurrected outside with the darkness still present. This lighting bug would go away when I re-entered the dungeon, but it was still a nuisance.


Rating: 1/10

+ innovative combat
- repetitive
- unchallenging
- unbalanced

Pixel Brady uses an innovative Action-RPG style of combat, which was interesting to begin with. I was thrust into trying to learn the controls, without any explanation of how to fight, or how to loot chests. I figured out that the letter ‘A’ was attack, and that the letter ‘z’ was a general action button, but it would be better if there was a tutorial to demonstrate this. The gameplay was initially fun, and addicting, but not necessarily challenging. It was kind of repetitive, plain level grinding, which was fine because I like that, but it got boring after the 3rd or 4th level.



My main quirk with this game, is that it was severely unbalanced. The monsters would go from being extremely easy, kill-in-one-hit encounters, to being hard-to-defeat monsters that would deal massive amounts of damage on you. After about the 4th level, I was impervious to fireballs, so there was no longer any reason to dodge them. After a while, I decided to barge right through hordes of enemies, because I realized they were a waste of time.

This game had a lot of roguelike elements, but it lacked the challenging nature of roguelikes. It felt arbitrary whenever I lived or died, and there were no interesting decisions to make, just merely grinding. The combat mechanic got repetitive after a few levels, and I realized that it didn’t require any depth nor precision, but just mindless attacking. A bit of balancing on the developer’s part would solve this, but what turned out was a lot of wasted potential.


Rating: 4/10

+ innovative combat
+ loots were fun
- unbalanced item system
- inherent lack of polish

Brady’s The Dungeon Crawler is a hack-and-slash roguelike with elements of fun, but overall lost potential. Hacking and slashing through . The game’s combat mechanics were unbalanced, and the fun parts of the combat became monotonous after a while. The lack of skills in the game was a big negative, for a game like this that had a lot of potential but lacked polish.