Dungeon crawlers as a genre have certainly seen much success over the years, but that doesn’t mean that everyone loves them. It takes a certain kind of mentality to find joy in gathering tons of loot through repetitious fighting in order to fight stronger things (repetitiously) for better loot. Now assuming there was something else added to the proceedings to keep things from feeling less monotonous, something like that could draw in a bit more of a crowd. That is to say, draw in even more of a crowd. And what usually sells like crazy regardless of medium or platform? Humor.

With that in mind (I think), Ayopa Games and Drowning Monkeys have decided to unleash Dungeon Crawlers on an unsuspecting App Store. The game itself is a combination of more typical dungeon crawlers with multi-floored dungeons, loot and experience grinding and turn-based strategy RPGs. Players will control a team of four adventurers (an alchemist, priest, barbarian, and dwarven warrior) over the course of five chapters, each with their own distinct environments. They’ll also be going toe-to-toe with plenty of nasty monsters as they scrounge for stuff.

Dungeon Crawlers is slated for a January 26th release. A universal release, might I add. For a special “introductory price” of $1.99 no less.

We at 148apps were very kindly invited to take a look for ourselves at the upcoming turn based strategy game Danger Alliance: Battles. Rather excited at the prospect, we were far from disappointed at what we saw.

Coming from the land of down under (Australia), Danger Alliance: Battles has some strong pedigree in its development studio with its two man team offering backgrounds in both mobile phone and console based development. It shows too with a distinctly professional sheen to everything about the title.

What also becomes immediately apparent is that Danger Alliance: Battles isn’t a gritty game. The general appearance isn’t quite full on cute but it does have a light-hearted vibe to it offering colorful and charming characters that commit to the many actions available. Variation is the key too. Provided before each Skirmish battle is the option to customize a squad. Players can then adjust tactics according to how their playing style is. Classes encompass a sniper, incinerator (flamethrower), grenadier, rocket launcher and commando, hopefully providing enough variety no matter how the player prefers to tackle the situation. They even offer their own quips mid battle.

In this preview build, we were only able to play the Skirmish mode but a single player campaign mode is promised in the future after the initial release of the game. This story is set to echo our own history at first with some subtle differences to ensure this is most certainly fiction.

Back to the Skirmish mode, things are looking pretty solid. Controls are easy to use with the ability to zoom in and out of the battlefield for optimum view. While on the iPad, things appear clearer, the game is far from muddled when viewed on the smaller iPhone screen. The Skirmish mode offers two forms of play with a Strategic Victory and Elimination mode available, as well as three different AI difficulty levels. The AI certainly plays a challenging game too with even the easy mode offering a solid match.

Danger Alliance: Battles is shaping up to be a pretty enjoyable game indeed. Developers Tome Studios promise that a Lite version will co-exist alongside the paid version offering one battlefield rather than a full selection like the full version, ensuring that everyone is able to give the title a shot when it arrives later this month. We’ll be keeping track of this progress as it nears full release.