Delve

"Delve" is a dungeon crawler that was being developed by Subzero_Dragon back in March of 2015 and hasn't seen any new updates since near the end of March of that year. And sadly those updates never managed to address one of the biggest issues with the demo in my opinion. That issue being that the teleport event for entering the dungeon eventually becomes unusable after you've entered and exited the dungeon enough times.



This isn't to say the demo can't be completed since I know NTC3 got far enough to beat the first boss in his review, but this bug stopped me from even reaching the second floor of the dungeon since I was trying to abuse the random map generation for the first floor to farm chests in order to buy better armor.

Admittedly I found a much better way to abuse the early game after the dungeon became inaccessible since there is a mine in town where you can farm infinite amounts of iron and steel ores. And if you combine that with the knowledge gained from the smelting book you can easily turn a few steel ores into thousands of silver by turning them into steel bars. Albeit getting this chain started can be a bit annoying since your pickaxes will randomly break. Though after I broke the first few pickaxes I eventually acquired one that I've been able to use to mine over 100 iron ores without breaking. So maybe the system that causes pick axes to break in this game is also busted.

To be fair the skill system in this game is also partially broken as far as I can tell. While I was able to spend experience in order to learn the warrior class skill power strike. It's impossible to activate this skill from any of the options you have access to during combat. Conversely the weapon skills I learned such as double blade and dual slash have to be activated in order via an in-game system during combat. And this system isn't as useful as you might think. On the plus side it does mean you can perform a bunch of moves in a single turn, but all of the weapon based skills in this game. At least those connected to the warrior class consume HP in order to perform. So without an ally to heal you afterwards it's a pretty bad idea to use up large portions of your health in order to go all out on an enemy. To make matters worse learning skills in this game also consumes experience currently held by your character. So learning a new skill might cause your character to lose a level.

As for the dungeon itself. One of the biggest issues I have with it as that you'll randomly get hit by falling rock traps in the dungeon. An issue because said rocks tend to do anywhere from 70 to 90 points of damage. And you have no way to know which tiles in the dungeon are rigged with such traps. In fact, I've passed through a tile safely before only to walk through it again later to be hit by a rock and vice versa. As a result I'm kind of left wondering if every tile in this game poses a risk of being trapped. It's just that certain tiles have higher odds of a trap going off when you step on it. It definitely seems like an idea that flow with the random nature of the dungeons, but an idea that is nightmarishly bad since it increases the amount of time you need to spend on grinding out cash to stock up on salves for the dungeon. After all, your going to need to spend your HP in order to activate your best skills after all.

As for the combat system itself it feels rather basic, but isn't that well thought out in terms of balance for the early floors. For starters the regular slimes you'll find in the early parts of the dungeon are so powerless they'll struggle to hurt the player if they've spent any money on armor upgrades. On the other hand the sparks you can find while mining will easily be able to inflict over 200 points of damage with magic while the slime queens can smash a fully upgraded character for over a hundred points of damage a pop with their regular attack. To make matters worse said monster is a damage sponge so you'll probably need to use weapon skills and potions to take it down.

The sad part is I do have a soft spot for games like "7th Dragon" and "Etrian Odyssey". So I really had high hopes for this game, but in it's current state it's really not worth spending your time on. It's just go too many bugs to be worth dealing with. Add in the fact one of them is run ending and your left with a demo that is potentially unbeatable and even if you don't run into that bug the game's combat will be both bore and frustrate you since certain enemies are way too weak while others are super annoying for having way too much HP for their own good. Though I suppose at the end of the day this review is kind of pointless since this project has most likely been cancelled.