About This Game Play a tactical dungeon tournament board game adventure, and not have to clean it up afterwards. There really is nothing quite like The Living Dungeon.Up to 9 players can take part in a battle of wits, luck, and skulduggery. Survive other adventurers, monsters, and the dungeon itself through combat, agility or dungeon manipulation. Only the strongest, fastest and smartest survive.Each player has only 5 actions per turn. They then have only 2 fretful minutes to decide what to do with those 5 actions. Panic will set in. The possibilities and threats will become overwhelming. Your mind will freeze up! Your time is running out for you to complete your objective, but one wrong move could be fatal! There are just so many ways to die in The Living Dungeon.FeaturesLots to Do: a thirty hour story mode, 4 multiplayer modes including Assassination, Head Hunter, Random Assassination, and Escape mode. All of that and you only need one controller.Unique Gameplay: Mix Tactics, luck and wit to outplan and out manoeuvre your enemies. Kill them, or help them kill themselves.Replay Value: The board layouts are generated randomly, so with A.I. biases and dice involved, no two games will ever be the same.Drop In/Out Multiplayer: Oh no! Phone call in the middle of an epic game with 8 players! It’s ok. You can switch your character onto A.I. mode temporarily. You don’t have to stop the game.Double Style: Play the game in a nasty evil dungeon, or a friendlier board game in a tavern. Two visual stylings to suit your mood.Control The Dungeon: Your little sister came in and wants to join in right in the middle of an epic match. Why not let her take over the dungeon. That way you can bribe her to ensure your victory.That’s Enough: You don’t need any more bullet points because this is a totally different experience and great fun. It’s also quite pretty. 7aa9394dea Title: The Living DungeonGenre: Adventure, Indie, Simulation, StrategyDeveloper:RadiationBurnPublisher:RadiationBurnRelease Date: 2 Nov, 2015 The Living Dungeon Download Youtube For starters, the game looks great. The character designs are interesting, the environments look good, and I tihnk it's fun that you can either play the game as a group in a living dungeon, or as people playing a tabletop strategy game.However, as a strategy game, I found the game very quickly becoming very repetitive and even a little dull. Besides the, somewhat gimmicky, mechanic of the flipping and turning of the rooms, the game introduced not too many interesting mechanics, in my opinion.The game describes itself as requiring wit and luck. The wit should make sense, because it is a strategy game, and luck makes sense too, because there are dice, right? Well... What I noticed, especially in the stages where your objective was not to escape, but to kill a certain character in one go, is that the dice were just perfect. Impossible odds? Yes indeed. The dice are scripted. Let me repeat that. The DICE are SCRIPTED. So instead of giving you a random situation in which you need to make the best of things, the developers have already decided what dice you will get and they are thinking of the perfect solution, which you need to recreate.To return to the mechanic of flipping rooms, I have found no way, but this could just be me, to figure out, before flipping, what the walkway was going to look like, resulting in deaths that felt, frankly, like bs deaths, as if I was being punished for not being psychic.Something else that rubbed me the wrong way was the audio. The prologue, narrated by Sajotir, was really good, and it drew me into the story, which sounded genuinely interesting. The other spoken diologue, however, seemed to be of very strange, phone-like quality.Some of the things listed above could be fixed and changed, which I think would make the game cleaner (like text no longer moving out of the GUI), but when it comes to mechanics, it did little to interest me, which is my opinion, in the end. And perhaps I was expecting something the game wasn't.. Not really worth what it costs.. I hate that I have to recommend or not recommend the game in these reviews. TLDR I recommend getting it when it goes on sale.Ok so there is a lot to like here, mostly in terms of story and art direction. The lizardman, Sajotir is an epic badass and characters like Meru are silly in an endearing, amusing way. The art direction and character design is cool and unique and it's well written. Unfortunately, it is saddled with such a threadbare game system that it just made me wish that these characters and this world was in a proper RPG. Like, this entire setup just freaking begs for a sick dungeon crawler and this is all I could think of while muddling through the game. And yes, I know this is a personal preference.But as it stands the system is...well, kinda janky? I'm not sure how to place it but it feels like a the first draft of a board game which ends up being a bizarre mixture of randomness and static which I can't quite make sense of. Also, I'm willing to forgive a lot in terms of graphics and physical presentation, but everything about the delivery is amaeturish. The actual voice acting is fine, but it seems to be low fidelity... like it was recorded on inexpensive hardware or encoded improperly. The animations are distractingly bad, especially when compared to the detailed 3d character models and it takes me out of the game. This is 2015 and you are asking 25 dollars for this game!! That kind of lack of quality in the implimentation does not cut it! If you didn't think you could pull off a full on 3D implimentation gracefully you should have gone 2D. There is nothing wrong with sprites or pixels, what we care about is that it's done in a quality way. A poorly done 3D game looks worse than a well done 2D one. Remember that.Bottom line is that I think that these devs should keep on doing what they are doing. They clearly have good ideas and I think with some more practice they will be able to impliment them. Hell, the art and presentation of the game was enough to make me pick it up! I'd recommend getting this game if it ever goes on sale for less than 10 dollars, (I think a 6.99 price point is about where I'd be most comfortable and not feel like anybody is being screwed).. Do you like board games....If yes,read on.This is a great board game where the programming takes care of the handling and the randomness.Simple rules, lots of fun.The board pieces change position, pieces come and go, and the turn of the dices forces you to make choices.No doubt this can be a great game.But at this very moment, it crashes a lot.I am confident that this company will take care of this.For those who hesitate, keep an eye on this game.This game, in a perfect condition, deserves to be played.. I recommend this game with reservations. It has some very cool things going for it. First off, if you are a fan of board games (like me) then this definitely scratches that particular itch, most of the time. There are a handful of levels in the story mode that are distinctively puzzles - that is to say, you don't really roll the dice or draw cards but rather attempt to play the dice and cards that you are are prescribed in the correct (and only correct) order to succeed the only way possible. These levels, for me, are the weakest part of the game. Yes, there is satisfaction from figuring out the solution - and you will have to figure it out, the game isn't big enough to be able to find any walkthroughs for - but the frustration begins to set in quickly when you realize that you want to play a tabletop board game, not a puzzle.Also, the RNG is often unfair. Now, let me clarify that I LOVE randomness in games. My favorite board games are Ameritrash style (Camp Grizzly, Fortune and Glory, Marvel Legendary, I could go on and on) and my favorite pen and paper RPGs are ones with random character generation (Heroes Unlimited, TMNT, well, anything old-school Palladium) so I am not at all one of those people who screams with rage every time he sees a game with RNG elements. However this game does sometimes take it a little far. Example: I was once tasked with killing two enemies who start out in the same room as each other on the opposite side of the map from me. After ten or so failed attempts I just happened to start the game with a Sentinel card in my hand. I placed a Sentinel in their room. Bam, two dead enemies in one round and I never had to leave my starting square. There were other times that the RNG had a similar sort of play against me. And as much as I love randomness, it is simply not fair to win or lose before you (or your opponent) even get to make a turn.Finally, the voice acting is tolerable, but the voice casting is atrocious. And if you don't know the difference, imagine if Bobcat Goldthwait had been cast as Groot. Sure, he could have said the lines, but it would have sounded ridiculous. I have the same problem here - Sajotir in particular just sounds silly.Now, I have bashed the game on three seperate criteria, but recognize that both the first and third issues only affect Single Player Story Mode, and frankly, board games like this are never as fun unless you're playing with friends. Also, both are small issues. I can overlook some bad voicing especially since you only hear the voices during the between-mission cutscenes. I can overlook some puzzle missions since they are not the majority. And while some will never get over the RNG issues, they were not enough to kill my entertainment completely.So, if you are a fan of board games and tactical games that require you to rethink strategies on the fly to deal with random elements, then this game is definitely worth picking up.
milronelino
The Living Dungeon Download Youtube
Updated: Mar 19, 2020
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