Many of you may know Ravenous Games, makers of games such as League of Evil and Random Heroes. Well they’re back with Devious Dungeons, a dungeon crawler in the same art style as their other games. I am a massive fan of the old school pixel look, it makes it much harder to date the game. Devious Dungeons has a loose story; a king needs a hero to clean out his 65 different dungeons. As with all heroes in this kind of game, you start with no armour and a very basic weapon. You need to steal, kill and destroy your way into the pages of history (great message for the kids right there).
The gameplay is very simple; Left, Right, Attack(A) and Jump(B). It shouldn’t take anyone long to get into the swing of the game and it is perfectly suited for smartphones. You must play through 3 dungeons in order to reach a checkpoint. Here you will find a shop and healer. Bosses are to be found after every 13th dungeon. Aside from looting and pushing onto harder levels, the game has quests that are per session, meaning that if you die your quest progress is reset. They offer simple cash incentives such as destroy 30 boxes, slay 10 ogres or collect 5 keys… you get the idea.
When you die there isn’t really any punishment – almost the opposite as you get a cash reward for how many quests and levels you manage to complete in one session. The more you do, the better the reward.
To keep you glued to the game Ravenous have included many items to purchase in the store that also change how you look, which is always nice. You can also use the IAP to buy coins to get items.
If you are fine with grinding the game you won’t really need to spend any extra cash, but be warned. To get the “The Collector” achievement you will need to raise a whopping 54,855 coins. To put that into context, if you were to use IAP that would cost about £26.70 or $44.95.All achievements are purely game based, not off of IAP or social media like some other games. You won’t gain 1000XP for just liking them on Facebook/Twitter here!
No game is perfect and this game is no exception. The random levels do become repetitive and it would be better suited to a true random generator for the amount of grinding that is needed.You do level up through game play, but whilst it adds to your strength, health and crit damage it is heavily flawed; the only real way to level is up is reading a tome found in hidden areas. At the time of writing this I am level 39, one tome gives me 714323 xp. This is the same as killing the final boss 1429 times!!! To me that seems extremely unbalanced. I would also like to see a long range weapon, or maybe a weapon that you need to charge for a short time before launching it, but as it has been out on IOS for over 5 months before making it onto Android I’m not holding out for any updates or extra levels. Apart from these minor criticisms this game really is worth the £1.09 Ravenous Games are asking. I haven’t been this addicted to a game since Quadropus Rampage by Butterscotch Shenanigans.
Still not sure you want to part with that £1.09? Check out this gameplay video…
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Or even this video of myself beating every boss without taking any damage.
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