Dungeon of Madness Review
:: MADDENINGPrice: $1.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5
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Dungeon of Madness is the latest release from Game Stew, the minds behind the popular Tower of Fortune series as well as game's likeWar of Eclipseand Ancient Legacy. Anyone that has followed this developer at any point knows they tend to make games that take a single, simple mechanic and build engaging experiences that push that particular mechanic pretty far. While this is true inDungeon of Madness, there are simply too many issues with the game's controls to make the interesting ideas underneath feel worth it.
The concept ofDungeon of Madness is similar to Pipe Dream,or more recentlySwapQuest,where players are combining pieces of a path together. Here players are rotating pieces of a dungeon map in order to kill monsters, gather gold, and progress deeper into the dungeon. In each level players must kill all of the monsters to retrieve a key and go to the next level. As an added challenge, players have 90 seconds to complete the level before agents of death begin populating the map to try and kill the hero. Dungeon of Madness also builds in to roguelike elements, gear, and unlockable characters to make things interesting.
Although the premise sounds neat, Dungeon of Madness is ultimately hard to enjoy because the game's control scheme and traversal mechanics are unintuitive and hard to manipulate. UnlikeSwapQuest,players only have the option of rotating tiles; they cannot swap tiles, nor can they control their character. Instead the player character wanders around somewhat aimlessly, though there are some tiles that will direct the hero in a specific direction. When there are no steering tiles around though, the hero's pathfinding skills are remarkably poor in the sense that he doesn't explore alternative paths. As a result, if players build a forking path of any kind, the hero will arbitrarily choose (and stick to) following only one of the two options.
The hero's strange movement decisions, paired with the inability to swap tiles, leaves players with almost no sense of agency. If players find themselves in a situation where they only have a bunch of forking tiles, they have to experimentally rotate each one with the hope that the hero will understand how the player is trying to guide them. Occasionally this will lead to players isolating a character on a single tile, which then cannot be rotated, because the game doesn't rotate tiles that are occupied by a unit (instead it brings up a menu showing the stats for that unit, whether it be the hero or an enemy).
Overall,Dungeon of Madnessseems like it has quite a bit to offer but is currently so frustrating to control that there's little enjoyment to be had. Players that wrestle with the controls will start seeing new enemies, gear, characters, and more, but all of that content doesn't feel worth pursuing considering there are games likeDungeon of Madnessout there that play better.