Fun but flawed – Lost in the Dungeon Review

Summary: It’s a fun game with a great concept, but I do feel like I’m fighting against the mechanics at times and I’m not sure how much longevity I’ll get out of the game without further updates. This is a dungeon card battler with an interesting twist in that you can exit a dungeon with your given loot or risk moving forward and losing it all. In between rounds, you can buy new cards at the shop, sell your unneeded loot and retool your deck. If you’re in it for the cards, there’s not much to offer. It’s a very basic set of cards that do things like add defense, attack power, energy, etc. But I think the way in which things all come together make the simplicity fun. Now on to the drawbacks: Some of the mechanics are just strange. You start with HP potions and antidotes against poison in your deck. But for some reason, each use costs 5 gold. While gold isn’t super difficult to come by, 5 gold is a pretty huge hit especially in the beginning of the game. I think it would make significantly more sense to remove the gold cost for these items. In addition, the game doesn’t seem very balanced. The starting warrior class deck has several cards that do a significant chunk of damage to your character in order to do damage to the enemy. It’s kind of frustrating and I think the game would be more well suited to at least have some basic “attack” cards with no special conditions in addition to these specialized cards. These two things do have a risk/reward mechanic, but since the main game is already predicated on this it makes it even more difficult to succeed. I’m not the kind of gamer who minds failure, especially in a game of this type. But I think the mechanics here just don’t make sense. In addition, the amount of content doesn’t seem to be huge at first glance. I’ve played for around 30-45 mins and my save slot states that I’ve finished 10% of the game. This is not a huge deal as the app description seems to mention further updates with more classes and dungeons. I’d love to see more loot to collect as well. All in all, I think it’s worth a pickup at this price if you believe in the game’s potential. I plan on continuing to mess around with the game but there’s a lot of needlessly frustrating elements.
Review by 30xtra on Lost in the Dungeon.