Dungeon Rushers review
:: DUNGEON CRASHINGPrice: $4.99
Version: 1.0.1
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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[EDITED] A new version of the game has hit the App Store that purportedly fixes stability issues with the game.
Dungeon Rushers is the latest game from Mi-Clos Studio, the minds behind the popular–though strange–space exploration roguelike Out There. In comparison to Out There, Dungeon Rushers seems very traditional, offering some turn-based dungeon crawling that revolves around leveling up a party, crafting new loot, and even making dungeons of your own to share with others online. This is a little bit of a letdown considering the creativity that Mi-Clos has brought to the table in the past, and even more so because Dungeon Rushers is woefully unstable and hard to play.
Quick crawling
The dungeon crawling action in Dungeon Rushers is pretty streamlined. It consists of you looking at grid-based dungeons from a top-down perspective as you move a game piece representing your party around the map by tapping to uncover new rooms and the things that are inside them.
As you uncover tiles to reveal more of the dungeon, you'll inevitably come across enemies, which you have to face off against to keep progressing. Battles in Dungeon Rushers are a turn-based affair where you select the moves of your party by dragging and dropping abilities on the targets you want to use them on. After battles, your party gains experience and can level up to learn new skills, which can be spread across the different skill trees for each character. It's all pretty standard stuff that goes by quickly thanks to the board game style movement system.
Dungeon manager
Once you clear a dungeon, Dungeon Rushers presents you with another one to take on. Sometimes these dungeons escalate the challenge, introduce a new party member, or contain special challenges that grant bonuses if you complete them. To make sure you can adjust to these changes, you'll need to spend some time between dungeons crafting and purchasing items to make sure you can make it through your next adventure. If you don't, it's likely that you'll die, which will force you to have to take the dungeon on again if you want to move the game forward. To keep things from feeling too repetitive, Dungeon Rushers allows players to build their own dungeons and share them with others, which ensures a healthy amount of dungeons to always be crawling through.
The idea of preparing appropriately for a dungeon is quite standard in dungeon crawlers, but the way it manifests itself in Dungeon Rushers is definitely a departure, and not really in any good ways. All of the things that you want to do to prepare for a mission are divided across several different menus and generally consist of grinding systems for you to get the things you want. This forces you to replay a bunch of levels repeatedly (even early on in the game) to get the gear you want to pass the next level.
Dungeon crashing
As annoying as Dungeon Rushers's gear grind can be, it pales in comparison to the general stability problems that persist in the game. Whenever you boot the game up, it's hard to tell how far into the experience you'll get before the game crashes out.
This was much worse in the 1.0 version of the game and things have improved in its current form, 1.0.1, but they still aren't perfect. Crashes still happen, and they make the frustrating parts of Dungeon Rushers that much more annoying to deal with. [NOTE: There has recently been a 1.0.2 update released that fixes some stability issues. The score of this review has been modified to disregard instability issues, assuming they are fixed in the latest version]
The bottom line
If Dungeon Rushers ran like a dream, it would be a decent dungeon crawler with some annoying quirks. With its crash issues though, the game is just too frustrating to bother with.