Roguelike games are not everyone’s cuppa tea, they are meant to be a rinse-and-repeat experience where you level up, earn rewards, and do it all again over and over. It comes with the territory. Ratalaika Games, a publisher known for making all types of games has released the second One More Dungeon 2 developed by Stately Snail.
Explore areas in a dungeon where enemies are waiting to stop you from reaching your goal, using a variety of different weapons and skills you must take on the hordes and take down the bosses. Was I able to crawl through this dungeon and succeed or did I lose my cool? Find out below in my review of this first-person dungeon crawler roguelike, One More Dungeon 2!
I Want To Break Free!
Story
One More Dungeon puts you in the shoes of a human prisoner, captured due to being different and upsetting the king with their presence. The king- a sentient snail- decides to execute you but before he has a change of heart. A creature down in the depths of the dungeon under the fortress has settled and is exuding blight which is destroying what protects their world.
We are asked to destroy the creature and in doing so offered a pardon if we succeed. Without any choice and the fact, that the guards have blocked the only exit out of the fortress we go on our mission to the dungeons to take on the enemies and bosses to reach the creature and be set free from this prison.
I SHALL HAVE MY REVENGE!
Gameplay
One More Dungeon 2 has so many different features for you to find to start you have a choice of different classes, each class has its unique skills and stats. A warrior has more health than a wizard for example, but a wizard has more power against the madness than the warrior. It all depends on your preferred playstyle.
As you progress you will find runes, these are used to remove blight which blocks doors, classes, and upgrades. Once you collect enough runes you can use them to remove the blight. This can also unlock slight upgrades such as extra health or energy.
There are a variety of different weapons to find as you explore, although you cannot buy them at the merchants you can find them for a price sometimes in magic casings which can be unlocked using the in-game currency which is gold coins, you can find these by defeating enemies and in objects and chests.
You have two weapons that you can use at the same time, a staff that shoots out a magic bolt, you will use crystals for the ammunition, and a sword. The staff’s crystals do a significant amount of damage from afar but cannot be used if you haven’t got enough crystals.
This can cause quite an issue and for me, it did as some of these staff will use around 10-20 crystals at a time and you are only able to use the exact crystal the staff has. If you are using a green staff, then blue and red crystals will be useless. Swords use no stamina, but power attacks do.
You can find bows that use your energy, which shoots one arrow, and a power shot that uses 2 arrows – this will use almost all your energy. If you happen to run out of energy, you can refill using the potions. Potions can be found that can be used such as health, energy, and concoction. They will be added to your inventory same with weapons and other useful items. A concoction will remove any madness, poison, burning, or freezing effects.
You can equip a map which will show you where to go, almost where you may have already been. Green squares are items, food, chests, or slugs. Blue is a new door you haven’t yet explored. Purple is the door to the next level, which can only be opened using a seal you’ll get from a Seal Keeper. These are types of mini-bosses found that once defeated will drop the seal for you to proceed.
If you find a map on a table this will show you the entire map uncovered, it’s helpful if you get lost. In some areas, you will find what looks like it’s infected, being extremely careful this is where you can go mad. Your doom bar rises if you break the jars, open up the cursed chest-like graves, are seen by a mad enemy that looks like a jar with an eye, or have a curse that grants you madness this can be easily defeated.
If your doom bar reaches the maximum, then you will be attacked by new enemies from the mad world, a parallel universe, once your madness drops these enemies will stop spawning. If your doom level increases too much then you will be given a curse that can only be removed at sacred altars. You can also enter the mad world using the portal which will take you there where you can earn special artefacts etc.
Artefacts are used to give you a bit of an upgrade or ability skill. Some are very useful and some not so much, collecting these will be added to your inventory. Around the levels you will find snail king statues, these statues have different items inside such as runes, coins, and crystals. You can only get these by using your bombs or the explosive barrels to blow them up. This is the same with the hidden cracked walls.
Colourful moving walls can be attacked normally using a melee weapon, these hide secret items, etc. Chests can only be opened using a key. Slugs will grant you energy, health, or coins depending on the item you throw away to them. Leveling up from defeating enemies or finding experience points will grant you 3 choices of upgrades or skills, so choose wisely.
Relics are special items like artefacts that can be used to give special upgrades, you can use multiple at the same time. Certain locations will have a picture on a wall with a lever this is sort of based on luck and you can get multiple different chances, a snake will grant weapons, bombs will spawn explosives which isn’t good, and a few others.
Different portals that have a key hanging from them will spawn 3 bags of treasure, with a time limit you must hit them to get an item. You can also find these bags sometimes spawning in a breakable box.
At every level, there are multiple varieties of enemies to defeat, although the balancing of these enemies is ridiculous for example the spiders can jump scare you and do huge amounts of damage. This is unbelievably frustrating and the number of times a spider or 5 of them attacked me at once just didn’t make this fun for me at times.
Once you finish a level you would come face to face with a boss battle, one feature I found interesting was the insurance, this meant if you paid 100 or more coins and you died in battle against the boss you could retry from the boss instead of the entire beginning.
One thing that did let me down when playing One More Dungeon 2 was the controls, firstly the controls felt very stiff when trying to aim, even with a higher sensitivity they still felt relatively slow which affected me when fighting enemies and bosses.
You can also jump and dash which helps you evade enemies sometimes. Another part that can be highly frustrating is the traps in the game, an enemy can run right through these and nothing happens, but if you step anywhere near them, they take a significant amount of your health causing you to stress about both enemies and the environment.
Oh My, What Big Teeth You Have!
Graphics and Audio
One More Dungeon has such a beautiful art style, using so much life and colour in all the levels, not one level is the same, they are designed based on the enemies you will find. For example, during level one you find it cleaner with a few traps, but the level with the spiders has webs that can block your path, poison coming from the floor, and a lot of death.
Enemies are the same, there are multiple different character models for the enemies and bosses such as different types of skeletons or spiders. Each with its own unique look and style. The worlds are just so nice to look at including the HUB world being mainly my favourite.
The gameplay is smooth other than the controls. Audio in One More Dungeon 2 although there are characters, there is no voice acting whatsoever, and mainly uses subtitles or captions to tell the story or if a character is speaking. Sound effects for the game such as enemies and weapons are really well done! Music is very eerie in some places being more ambient and based on the atmosphere which adds to the suspense at times.
That’s Not An Option
Options and Accessibility
There are multiple different options although controls are not able to be remapped. Sound can be adjusted like all games. The game options have a few things that can be changed such as language, camera sensitivity, and brightness. You can also change to an invert camera.
The camera shakes, and the tilt can be turned on and off as can the mini-map or camera animation. There are no accessibility options, so this could be tricky for those who have trouble with games like this plus if you have a fear of spiders, there is no option to turn that off either, which we can see in a lot of games where spiders are enemies.
Final Thoughts
One More Dungeon 2 was not a bad playthrough, although there are a few things I would like to see improve such as the stiff controls and balancing when it comes to the enemies. It was colourful and had a beautiful art style which made it nice to explore and take a look around. It could definitely have a few more options or features but other than that I enjoyed reviewing this game, it was a unique look for a dungeon crawler as well that anyone who enjoys this kind of genre could really have a good time playing!
One More Dungeon 2 is AVAILABLE NOW! On Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch
GAMERHUB RATING: THREE (Out of FIVE) JOYSTICKS
(Thank you to Derek at PR Hound and the team at Ratalaika Games S.L. and Stately Snail for providing the code for this review)
