Dandy Dungeon has a somewhat neat core mechanic of puzzle-rpg that is heavily bogged down by free to play mechanics and unnecessary cruft. There is a good idea in there about planning paths for your character to take and defeat all enemies, but I think that it would've been a better product with a premium price and more balanced mechanics. I had -some- fun with it, but in the end it could've been way more enjoyable than what it was.

After suffering through multiple download screens just after the app started, I got a bunch of pop-ups telling me of current events and of rewards that I had gained by starting the game in such a time. Things that I didn't know about; Rice balls and other consumables that would probably otherwise be purchased with real money. The story of the game is that you play a guy that wants to make videogames and you test them. As you go through the games, he adds more features for you to play with.

The core idea of the game is that you have a dungeon screen and you draw a path for your character to go through. You get a perfect rating if you visit every single tile of the dungeon and you can collect gold, level-up and cast spells. Fight against enemies occur when you collide with them, and they resolve in a turn-based fashion. Each level has an energy cost, hidden rewards, materials that you can fuse with your gear to improve it and consumable items that you can use on cooldown timers. 

There's a lot of this that could be removed. Having each room be a puzzle where you decide the proper path to take to defeat all enemies, explore all squares and get to the door is good enough. The game doesn't need to back out of the gameplay to go back to the guy's room every five minutes. You spend more time dealing with your items and daily bonuses and in-app related stuff than you spend moving around and fighting enemies.

It's a shame, because Dandy Dungeon has an interesting style and some okay ideas. They're just completely stuck in freemium garbage, and I couldn't enjoy myself with it more than an hour or two before uninstalling it.

AuthorJérémie Tessier
Categories2/5, iOS, RPG