Overall, Endless Dungeon is a very fun successor to Dungeon of the Endless. I do miss some of the strategic aspects of the first game (particularly power rooms), but it’s remarkable how well Amplitude has managed to shift genres to twin-stick looter. The visuals and audio are a new peak for the studio (and that's saying something!). I especially love the lighting – seeing the long shadows of beasties cast against the walls as they shamble towards you is just fantastic.

However, I have some suggestions for small refinements to parts of the game that would really improve the play experience, particularly for solo play, higher difficulties and challenge runs. There are small mechanical spoilers in this post. These suggestions are ranked in order of importance.

#1: Give us a way to order the bot to important places (e.g. the main bot slots and crystal drill points) using the map.

When crystal drilling, in solo play it’s almost impossible to avoid some damage to the bot, because you have manually lead it back to a bot slot. This leads to really suboptimal player movement just to make the bot go where it needs to – frustrating.

The AI is overall decent, but does not prioritize targets well enough when escorting the bot for the player to be able to take the lead – and there’s simply no time to go all the way back to the bot’s original position to give it the command to go back by itself.

#2: The invisible mode for the Blur is kind of an irritating mechanic as currently implemented.

They can go invisible for a really long time, and even if you know exactly where they are (from the map and footprint visuals), you can’t do anything about it! If one of the tankier ones gets up to the bot, often they can get a good bit of damage in even if you’re pre-firing exactly where they will spawn.

I like the idea behind the invisibility, but depending on the room layouts and the spawns you get it can feel unfair. I would love for there to be some way for the player to “counter” this a little. Maybe the easiest to implement would be being able to do a small amount of damage to them while invisible – keeps the mechanic intact but removes a bit of the frustration factor.

This could even tie into their elemental weakness: maybe only light weapons can damage them? Alternatively, they could become immune only to turret damage while invisible (the turrets can’t “target” them anymore). You get the idea. Some kind of small change to the way it works to give the player a little more agency in dealing with the Blur and to avoid cheap shots.

#3: Is the Royal Shyness Bug enemy working as intended?

This is the only enemy in the game that sits in its spawn and barfs enemies at you. A “spawner” enemy is obviously a great design choice for the Bugs, but it’s very irritating to have to walk all the way to their spawn to kill them. It makes me choose levels without Bugs more often just so that I don’t have to deal with it. Because it’s the only enemy that doesn’t leave the spawn, it feels particularly out of place.

Lots of ways this could be addressed, even if you don’t want to change its AI to make it leave the spawn room: Royal Shyness dies if it’s the last enemy left in a wave, or it loses 10% health each time it spawns minions… and so on. As long as I don’t have to trudge my way across my entire carefully planned defense route just to put it down!

#4: Add a small visual to the Bot healthbar to indicate whether or not it has been damaged this Level. 

Obviously it’s easy enough to tell at the beginning of the game, but if your bot has taken some damage on an earlier Level, that doesn’t work. This could really be anything – a green tick on the bot icon, a gold star, a vertical line to indicate what health the Bot started the Level with…