XBLA Indie Review: Dungeon Tales

“Worth Getting Some Friends Over For!”

An XboxHornet review by Tsietisin.

Andreil’s Game has come up with a rather interesting RPG: It’s a co-op adventure for you and up to three of your buddies to go around tackling all manner of bad guys in a top down dungeon.

The game starts simply, with an  introduction to your 4 main characters and their abilities. Your team is composed of the standard RPG fare of Swordsman, Bow man, Thief and Healer. Each of them are represented by a bouncing ball with disembodied hands, where you tell them apart by the headgear they are wearing, and each of these characters has only one character-specific action they can do: The swordsman and bow man can use their respective weapons, the thief lays a trap and the healer does exactly what you it suggests. Note that these actions are the only action they can do – The only other time you will use a second button is to carry on a conversation, interact with a character or sleep on a bed.

After a brief training level, where chickens are mercilessly slaughtered by you, brought back to life and then sold, it’s off on your adventure. You start using each character individually, giving you some more practice their unique methods of play, and these character-specific scenes also lead to some quite unique levels. For example, when you are playing as a healer, you are trying to make it through a creature infested cave, but as a healer you have no attack. Instead, you must protect the band of people that you are traveling with (computer-controlled NPCs that do attack) – Having an entirely passive role is something that I have not seen before, and made for a nice surprise.

Eventually, you all come together and get on with the story, and it is also at this point where the game starts to lose something. The first thing that I noticed was the writing style – The developer who made this does not have English as a first language, so you have a weird translation that initially comes over as fun and quirky, however as time goes on, it proves to be more confusing, and never really explains where any particular plot is going.

I had figured early on in the game that I would eventually have all 4 adventurers working together and was expecting some puzzles that would have required each of their skills. All I could see was various blocks that needed to be removed by using a particular adventurers skill nearby to them. I found that the blocks were usually set in such a way that any of the characters could make a hole in the wall for everyone to get through.

This game is mentioned as being for four players and I think that if you were to have some friends round to play with you, that would certainly add something. Without, you have the Xbox taking the place of your friends, however the Xbox seems to want your characters to run around randomly, attacking randomly and doing nothing to help you. If you need someone in particular, it is often easier to just hit the left bumper button to switch your controlled character, take control of them and do it yourself.

One bonus though is the random dungeon feature: This just takes a map, all your characters and lots of things to kill. If you do manage to get your friends round for this, I could see this option being a lot more fun than the story mode if you have the extra people to play with.  Additionally, this mode doesn’t require the “intro” to be played through to unlock all characters for play.

The music for this game has an old 16-bit console vibe to it, starting with the main music as a jaunty little tune reminiscent of the Squaresoft games on the SNES. There did not appear to be much variety in the tunes dependent on your location, but the main tune was good enough to not make me get bored or annoyed.

I feel that if some more work was done to get the writing clear and coherent, along with a plot that it a little more obvious and some improvement on the computer controlled AI, this game could be a winner. At 80 points it’s certainly worth getting some friends over for some random action.

Game score: 7/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.