Vidjama Gmaes Work

(Copy provided by Video Game Outsiders)

I have been playing a lot of Dungeon Clawler over the last week, it’s one of those games where time compresses and you feel like you’ve been playing it for ten hours straight but then realize it’s only been about three.

Some of you may be asking yourselves; “Connor, I’m terrible at claw games. Will Dungeon Clawler be brutal for me?” And the answer to that is…yes, yes it will. As someone who is also bad at claw games, I will say that Dungeon Clawler is not as brutal because the game isn’t clearly rigged against you unlike the physical claw machines. You’re still going to have a hard time, albeit not as hard since there’s only two dimensions here.

The premise of Dungeon Clawler is pretty simple; you go through a series of battles with an ever-expanding deck of items that get dropped into your claw machine. Each turn you get two claws to pick up items that get used against your enemies. They contain attacks, defeneses, buffs, debuffs, anything your heart imagines. The further you get the more you’ll see items that enhance other items.

My personal favorites are items that collect other items, like a glob that sticks to anything around it or a magnet that attracts metal items. There are items that shrink random items in your pit, making them easier to pick up in large quantities. Ultimately you are left with a couple of factors; your skill, and your luck. You do get instances between rounds where you can heal up, get new goodies, get coins, etc.

Is Dungeon Clawler good? Yes and no. I’m going to say that the highs are high and the lows are really low. One aspect I’ve never been particularly fond of with roguelikes like Dungeon Clawler is that eventually the game does feel like it’s mostly out of your hands whether you win or lose. The mixture of items, their placement on the board, and the boss monsters that increasingly have ridiculously unfair stacks of buffs/debuffs and damage/block they can dish out every single turn.

Or if you have really bad luck like me, you’ll just break the game by clogging the pipe.

I gravitate toward roguelikes where a “bad run” isn’t game-ruining and I have to say that Dungeon Clawler falls into one of those games. I have played tons of these games where bad runs just make the game harder, but they don’t feel completely helpless. For instance a shooter might be harder if you get a bad mixture of weapons, buffs, and enemies but you still feel like you can skill through it.

Here? Eventually you get to a point where the game hasn’t given you much in the way of rewards and items to work with, and you’re up against enemies that can just tank dozens of hitpoints per turn and blanket you with 150+ hp strikes in a single turn as well. There’s only so many times I’m willing to throw my hands up and say that I lost and it was completely out of my hands before I’m done playing the game entirely.

There are ways to mitigate the RNG but not enough in my opinion. Inevitably with runs, I’ve found, the stress turns into tedium as you get enemies capable of not just throwing 25+ shield on themselves in a turn by dishing out 180+ damage on that same turn. Perhaps the fact that enemies are guaranteed in their buffs/attacks is part of why I find the game so frustrating, maybe if enemies also had to claw from their own piles it would give the game more of a sense of fairness. But runs do feel nice right up until the game dumps you in front of a grossly overpowered boss without much health to start off with and leaves you endlessly playing catchup.

I would suggest checking out the demo but the developer took that offline. Maybe wait until a new demo shows up, if it ever does.