Hello everyone! I picked up the founders pack for Dungeon of the Endless as i was a huge fan of Endless Space. I would like to take a minute and post my first impressions of Dungeon of the Endless



The first thing that pops into my head... holy crap this game is hard! I know the game is being tuned all the time but the "easy" difficulty was nothing short of impossible for me. I don't typically play any game on easier settings as i enjoy a good challenge. I got a little more than a good challenge on "easy". I tried easy many times and failed just as many times only managing to get to the second floor. I have not tried very easy yet but im thinking that might be the best route to go until i unlock more heroes etc. These difficulties should possibly be renamed easy and hard not very easy and easy



The actual gameplay is quite entertaining. It's a good challenge in quite a few ways which is right up my alley. Trying to balance your spending, building, character leveling and items etc requires a lot of thinking and planning. The unique function of turning power on and off from room to room is really awesome as well as it adds a new layer to the overall strategy required to beat the level. I think the very core concept of the game here is quite addicting and it kept me coming back for more



Carrying resources from floor to floor is something that really screws up my strategy. I can have a game where im doing excellent and very close to progressing to the third floor for example. Ill have my heroes and defenses set up in a certain way that seems effective at fighting off every wave up until that point. I might have say 50 industry left to use but then i think to myself this floor hasnt been too difficult so far so why not carry over what i have left to floor 3? that floor is going to be that much harder so that sounds like a great plan. I go and open the last door on floor 2 and initiate another few waves of mobs. No problem right? wrong. this time i have waves of enemies that seem to be 2 or 3 times larger / stronger than any wave i have faced thus far. All of a sudden im staring at the game over screen when all 2-3 of my heroes have been overrun and instantly sent to oblivion. I might have been able to avoid it by sinking all of my resources into defenses but who could have guessed the very last wave of enemies would be way way way stronger than the previous? All in all my desire to save resources for the next floor gets me killed more often than not which i guess is part of the actual strategy to this game. I don't like that i occasionally encounter massive overpowered waves of enemies when i have been doing so great up until that point. Seems like a combination of underspending on defense and an unbalance in enemy waves



Science is something that i would like to see have a bit more use as well. I noticed it said work in progress so im sure things will change between now and the official release. Finding those artifacts that you need to research things is a bit of a wildcard. Sometimes i would get lucky and find one and research something good and other times i would find absolutely nothing and get stuck with your stock module options which are pretty scarce. The artifacts aren't a bad idea but maybe the actual core could be modified to make use of science and perhaps more minor module upgrades or something? Perhaps give the player 1 choice of a random module upgrade directly at the core and keep the artifact the same with 4 options. Not having the correct modules available seems to contribute to my death when i only have the level 1 prisoner prod available for defense or my resources are scarce because i only have level 1 modules available



Bugs! im happy to report that i have only encountered one bug during my various games. Immediately after opening a door i right clicked my hero down to an NPC hero in the room directly below me which caused my hero to remain in that room forever. I could no longer move them anywhere or do anything with them. They wouldn't even attack incoming enemies. This did cause me to lose my game unfortunately as that hero was my main hero i was focusing on. Long story short don't click on anything else until your hero actually goes into a room after opening a door



The combination of retro graphics and more state of the art shadows and lighting is also quite refreshing. Linking this game to Endless Space and Endless Legend is also a nice bonus here. Its nice to see similar concepts such as FIDS and similar locations (Auriga) across multiple games. All in all i think this is a great game i cant wait to see how everything plays out when its officially released! Keep up the good work!