Re: THE DUST: PIXEL SURVIVAL Z BATTLEGROUND 32 Bit Crack
Anastacia Iacono
Magic Pixel Survival is a survival fighting game with simple gameplay but not easy to win. All you have to do is fight to the end to protect your life. Try to destroy the army of violent enemies that are looking for ways to kill you. Equip your weapon, hit your target, find the way out, and sweep away all who stand in your way for the treasure. A dark night is approaching, can you survive? Take control of your life and become a hero now!
Game features:
- Colorful, beautiful pixel graphics
- Smooth motion, high speed
- Various weapons collection
- Select items to increase combat power: Armor, Max Health, Area, Velocity...
- Many types of characters
- Diverse game map, each level is a different arena
- Fight hundreds of enemies at once
This is my short review of Dungeon of the Endless (DOTE), a unique indie game released by Amplitude Studios in October 2014. DOTE features an unusual mashup of gameplay from several different genres, incorporating aspects of perma-death and procedurally generated levels from roguelike games, hero management similar to League of Legends or DOTA, resource economy management out of a turn-based strategy game, and finally tower defense gameplay as well. It's a bizarre mix, and I can't say that I've ever encountered anything quite like DOTE before. While all of this doesn't entirely fit together into a cohesive whole, at the very least it's an intriguing experiment. Here's an introductory video that I put together showing the basics of the gameplay, and another pairs of links to a longer full game played out on Livestream.
Let me start by describing the gameplay. DOTE starts with your characters crash-landing on an alien planet, finding themselves at the bottom of a dungeon full of monsters. Your goal is to guide them through twelve floors to reach the exit from the labyrinth, with increasingly deadly obstacles on each successive floor. You begin with two starting characters, and can recruit up to two more by finding them along the way. Heroes begin at Level 1, and can increase to a maximum of Level 15 through the use of one of the game's resources. Heroes gain additional stats for each extra level, along with new abilities (both passive and active). Then can be further customized through the equipment of weapons, armor, and accessories, which can be found or bought along the journey.
Sharing focus with the heroes in DOTE are something known as "modules". These are places where you can put down structures, either resource-generating ones to power your economy or defensive towers to shoot back against invading enemy hordes. The first of these two groups is officially called "major modules". Rooms that have major module slots (which are not always present) can be used to produce extra Industry, Science, or Food. You will receive these resources every time that you open a door to a new room, which fuctions as the beginning of a new random encounter (much like visiting a new beacon in FTL). Basic strategy in DOTE involves getting down some Industry and Food generators ASAP at the start of each new floor to start powering your economy. Each room may or may not also have slots for "minor modules", which is where players can place defensive towers of some kind to shoot at the monsters or provide some other benefit. These towers become critically important as the game progresses, as the enemy floods become too strong for your heroes to deal with them on their own. Good tactical play involves picking the right battleground for your heroes to fight with the benefit of towers supporting them.
Of course, you can't simply build major and minor modules anywhere that you want. Both of them require the room to be powered using another one of the game's resources known as "Dust" (the yellow circular symbol in the picture above). Monsters can only spawn in unpowered rooms, so knowing which rooms to power and defend, and which rooms to leave dark, forms the basis of DOTE strategy. Dust is almost certainly the most important resource in this game, as floors that produce an excess of Dust tend to be extremely easy. You wind up facing very few enemies when that happens. On the other hand, sometimes you run a critical shortage of Dust, and those critters are just spawning EVERYWHERE. There are three other resources in total. Industry (the red gear symbol) is used to build major and minor modules. You need a lot of industry in this game, don't neglect it. Food (the green wheat symbol) is used to recruit new heroes, level up your current heroes, and carry out emergency heals in mid-battle. Food is also extremely important, make sure to have plenty on hand. The fourth and least important resource is Science (the blue energy symbol), which is used to research improved modules over the course of the game (and can also be used to refresh the cooldown of hero abilities in combat). This aspect of the gameplay isn't as well fleshed out as it could be, and I typically find that I near far less science than anything else.
All of this stuff sounds great on paper, and there are some aspects of DOTE that work well indeed. Figuring out which rooms to power and what modules to build can make for some tough choices at times. The dungeon floors are all randomly generated, so you'll always be forced to make plans on the fly as you open each door. Strategy is generally based around two major elements: knowing what modules to put down (and where) in the economic side of the game, and then defending them through controlling monster spawns in the tactical side of the game. Enemies will not spawn in rooms that have been powered, or in rooms where a hero is standing, which gives the player a good deal of latitude over their appearance. Once the player gets past the "OMG monsters are everywhere!!!" phase, he or she can begin actively planning around where they'll appear, and how to deal with them when they do. This can be a lot of fun.
DOTE also has an excellent minimap system that helps enormously in understanding what's taking place. I found myself spending most of the game on the minimap screen, which was almost a shame because it wasted the pixel artwork on the default screen. You can't really focus on the cool fighting animations because you need to be watching your hero lifebars and ability cooldowns during the combat phase of each turn. (Fortunately this game can be paused at any time, again much like FTL. Pausing often is highly encouraged.) Oh, and have I mentioned that this game is hard? Brutally, painfully hard? There are only two difficulty levels in DOTE, which the designers have trollingly named "Too Easy" and "Easy". I hate this decision, as the "Easy" difficulty is nightmarishly tough to complete and the stupid name causes all kinds of confusion. You'll need to know exactly what you're doing to have any shot at winning this game. (DOTE needs a middle difficulty level quite badly, as the lower one is indeed rather simple for an experienced player, while the higher difficulty is just masochistic.) You won't be winning this game on the first try. Expect to need some trial and error to succeed.
Those are the positive aspects of the gameplay. As I suggested, however, there are a number of problems with DOTE that cause the whole to be less than the sum of its individual parts. The first problem is one of pacing. The dungeon lasts for 12 floors, but there isn't enough content in this game to justify that length. It only takes about eight floors to get a full team of four heroes, equip them all with weapons and armor, level them up sufficiently, and research all of the module upgrades using the science resource. You've got your team more or less maxed out, and the game just keeps going on and on in, well, endless fashion. The last few floors DRAG very noticeably. It gets quite boring to play. The designers try to make these last few floors harder by giving you fewer resources to work with: less Dust so fewer rooms can be powered, fewer module slots to weaken your economy, more doors to open to find the exit to the next floor, and so on. Now this is harder, true enough, and the last floor in particular can be absolutely brutal. But the gameplay isn't changing one iota. You're doing the exact same thing on each floor, just being forced to do it with fewer and fewer resources. There just isn't enough content in DOTE to justify having so many floors. Imagine if FTL had no rebel flagship to fight, and instead added four more sectors to travel through, with each one giving you less and less scrap rewards. Yes, it would be challenging to complete, but would it be fun and interesting to play? Not really. That's the situation with DOTE.
Another major problem lies with the heroes in this game. The heroes do have major differences between them, and some of them are much stronger choices than others. However, the heroes ultimately don't seem to have that much effect on how the game functions in practice, because once again you tend to be doing the exact same thing on floor after floor after floor. Some heroes simply do it much better than others. You might play one game with a tank character, another with a glass cannon DPS character, another with an economic-oriented character, and so on. But again, the big picture strategy of building the resource economy and controlling monster spawns never really changes. Because I was doing the same thing strategically in every game, the tactics of each combat round (which do change depending on the heroes) didn't ultimately matter very much. This is further compounded by the way in which the minor modules, the tower defense part of the game, tend to overshadow the heroes on the later floors. Your characters can be quite frail in DOTE, and they stand little chance of stopping enemy waves on their own at the end of the game. This is how the gameplay is supposed to work - I mean, there's no point in having the tower defense aspect otherwise - but it makes the heroes almost redundant on the final few floors. Anyone could be standing in those rooms preventing the spawns from occuring. The towers are going to be doing most of the killing when the hordes show up. I actually played a full game with a solo character (on the lower difficulty), and I found that the towers could handle things more or less on their own without any need for the heroes at all. This did much to kill the replayability factor for me.
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