Dungeon Clicker Review

Parodies are funny things. On the one hand, they serve to poke fun at a concept or idea, while on the other, they pay some tribute and hold some reverence for their source material. When well done, parodies can sometimes eclipse their original inspiration through being particularly clever or outright better than what came before. However, in the case of a game like Dungeon Clicker - a sort of "parody" of Diablo or other dungeon crawlers - the developers simply made a mindless game that uses one tired joke and shows practically no effort beyond that.

The joke that Dungeon Clicker relies on for its parody of Diablo is that dungeon-crawler games tend to involve a high amount of repetitive combat in order for players to "grind out" gear for their character, which in turn is then used to repeat more combat for more gear in a seemingly endless cycle. The way Dungeon Clicker decides to poke fun at this concept is by having players press on the screen to earn gold, and then having them use that gold to level up and receive gear.

In that previous sentence, I successfully described all that there is to do in Dungeon Clicker. While there are slight variations to collecting gold (i.e. tapping a chest instead of a button), there is precious little to do in the game to make it interesting in the slightest. Even the persistent upgrade mechanics outside of the primary game are mind-numbing.

The amount of time and effort that went into Dungeon Clicker just doesn't seem apparent in a game that is overwhelmingly dull. Sure, the environments that players are panned around in automatically look nice, and there are a couple other (obvious) dungeon crawler jokes (e.g. color coded gear), but all of that serves as slight and boring window dressing to an endlessly tedious experience.

All of this being said, Dungeon Clicker is a free game, with a relatively unobtrusive in app purchase system, so it is easy for players to jump into and see for themselves whether the "click for gold" mechanics grab them more than they did me - which is to say hardly at all. I would find it hard to believe that this attempt at parody stuck with anyone as a funny and compelling experience worth recommending. Overall, Dungeon Clicker just plain feels like a concept borne out of a bad April Fool's Joke, making it a passing curiosity in concept, but a boring experience in practice.