Won on my first run! Your pixel art style works well and the abilities make for confusing yet engaging gameplay. I'll be back for my Dungeoneer medal and more of that really good music.
Reviews for "Dungeon Deli"
nice game :O turn is long
Jeez, I hate to say this, but I had a really rough time with this game and found it very difficult to stick with it, eventually having to quit to preserve my sanity.
At its core, the game is quite the interesting experiment. Similar to games like Necrodancer, it is attempting to change up the typical dungeon formula with a mechanical twist, being not only rotating directional attacks, but also constantly shifting modes that affect the field. It changes typically straightforward combat and navigation into a improvizational puzzler that keeps you on your toes and has you dance around in a bizarre, but intriguing way. It's definitely unique and it piqued my interest!
However, while the mechanics are interesting in theory and ideally should make a fun puzzle dungeon, the more I played, the more I got aggravated with the huge side-effect of tedium that the mechanics wrought:
*It's just so damn annoying that each step you take has to shoot out a bullet, and you need to wait for that bullet to go and hit a wall (which can be very far away at times) before you can take another step. Over and over and over, it adds so much time and turns movement into such a chore, especially if the room is already clear of enemies: why wouldn't you make it so that the player has to decide when to shoot, or at least turn off the auto-shooting when the room is clear? I'd also turn off the modes when a room is clear too: it's all such pointless tedium!
*I also didn't find the whole rotating bullet aspect to be that fun. Ideally, I'd like it to be that you'd be dancing around an enemy to try and always keep your gun pointed at them, but there's just no way to do that, meaning that all you can do is just try to keep them on one side of you and stall until your gun rotates all the way back around. With that, it's just turned into basic kiting but with more steps: not that exciting at all.
*To add to all of this, the game is rather dry in terms of pizazz and juice. For example, killing enemies just has them instantly poof away instead of giving some sort of satisfying feedback. I understand it's a dungeon crawler so I'm not expecting big explosions and fireworks, but something would be better than nothing.
*There were also a couple of bugs here and there, like how an enemy moved during my shooting when they aren't typically allowed to do that.
As said, I appreciate the experiment as I think the idea behind this has merit, but the current execution of said idea is not my cup of tea.
EvanMMO responds:
Thanks for playing. Looking forward to the vid!
At first, it was abnormally confusing. After few minutes I started to understand the mechanics. In my opinion, quick info about how it works might solve all the complains about this game.
It's really well-made, however making the shots go off in a sequence rather than where the player directs them is a bad move. I nearly died on the second floor due to not my own skill but because I could not tell the shots where to go. It's a cool concept, but I feel like it just adds unnecessary difficulty.