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My take on Endless Dungeon after ~7 hours: It's Dungeon of the Endless, except this time you directly control your characters. Like, under the hood, that is the only change to the minute to minute gameplay. While it's cool how that enables this to be a co-op game, I don't think it's a particularly beneficial change from a gameplay perspective. It's not actively harmful to the game, but it feels pretty unengaging for two main reasons 1) Most of the time, you're just standing in one spot holding down the shoot button anyway, occasionally moving around to punch towers to repair them. 2) To interact with points of interest like build spots, shops, doors, etc. you now have to manually move your character over to them, instead of just clicking. Sometimes you need to run back across the entire dungeon to upgrade a turret at the start, for example. Those don't make it bad and the game is still about as fun as Dungeon of the Endless was, but playing it solo feels like Dungeon of the Endless with extra steps. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Oct 20, 2023 |
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Oct 20, 2023 08:37
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 16:11 |
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The AI in this game is frustratingly bad  First is the way it chooses which weapon to use. If it has a gun that provides an elemental advantage against one of the spawning enemies, it will exclusively use that gun even if it's a terrible weapon for the situation. They'll use e.g. a short-ranged fire weapon against a wave that has one bug spawner and 4 bot spawners. So I've been finding it most effective to make sure their default neutral weapons are the only thing they're holding because they're the only guns that they can't make a poor decision with. Then there's the actual combat AI where they run up until they're close enough to hit an enemy, then they stand in one spot fighting the rest, or pushing further forward. This is particularly pronounced when they use a short-ranged weapon like the Campfire. They'll run up to meet the very first enemy that shows up, then after killing it they will stand there getting annihilated by all of the remaining enemies while making no attempt to back off. This is a weapon where you want the enemies to come to you, not to rush headfirst into them. Again, not so bad if you never equip alternate weapons on them, but if you do, make sure they're not short range. Okay then there's the way they use charge weapons. They seem to always aim at the closest enemy, so if they're using a charged weapon with a slow fire rate they'll waste all of their shots on single individual weak enemies while the rest of the wave overwhelms them. And again, okay - just never pick up new weapons on them. But then you run into things like how they don't actually stay where you tell them to when you tell them to hold their position. They don't even stay in the room you tell them to. So okay the most efficient way to play this game is to have enemies run through your turrets first so that your turrets gain as much experience as possible and then use your heroes as a backup to kill anything that makes it past the turrets. Except you can't do that with the AI here because as soon as enemies start spawning they will run two rooms over and start pushing against the enemy wave, ensuring that they get every kill and your turrets don't get a chance to fire, so they never gain experience. e.g. this screenshot where as soon as a wave starts, those two AI companions run along the yellow lines, past the turrets:  Plus things like how they never repair or upgrade turrets, having no way to tell them to follow the crystal bot or ask them to hold their fire or switch weapons, etc  It didn't bother me too much at first but by the time you start hitting the core they become pretty goddamn useless. Actually, not just useless - they're actively detrimental to you by depriving your turrets of experience. The game itself is still pretty cool but I think I'll need to play co-op to keep having fun with it. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Oct 21, 2023 |
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Oct 21, 2023 22:52
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