Dungeon Rushers Is A Dungeon Crawling, Turn-Based, RPG Sandwich

Last night I dove into Goblinz Studio’s upcoming game Dungeon Rushers, and besides being reminded that words looks cooler with an unnecessary “z” at the end of them (Goblinz, how coolz!), I found myself face-to-face with a fun little dungeon crawling experience.

I’m always a little hesitant when I boot up a pre-release build, half expecting to end up walking on the glass of unfinished coding or stand-in graphics, but my experience with Dungeon Rushers was surprisingly smooth.

Dungeon Rushers opens with a spunky young boy named Elian who is fed up with being the local toilet cleaner, and decides to realize his adventurous dreams by running away to become a dungeon looter. Thus the story begins and in no time I was navigating Elian through the game’s first dungeon by clicking the neighboring tiles I wished him to explore. Moments into the dungeon we stumbled across our first enemy encounter which was marked by an enemy token. A window popped up and gave me a basic rundown of what kinds of enemies I’d be facing (in this case: skeletons) and the game shifted into turn-based combat mode.

I was greeted by some nice pixel artwork done by the game’s designers, and the turn-based combat was basic enough that I grasped the gist of it after reading the tutorial notes once, yet it wasn’t so simplistic that it was boring. Each character (you’ll eventually have a whole party of characters) has basic abilities that they can use to various effects. The more powerful or useful an ability is, the more mana or energy it will require. With a few whacks from my default level 1 noob sword, I defeated the skeletons…but not before some silly banter about how skeletons are able to speak to begin with.

As I played further into Dungeon Rushers, the game’s humor really stuck out to me. I liked it. I wasn’t laughing out loud or anything like that, but it was nice. The occasional jabs at fantasy-game tropes and the argumentative nature of some of the characters was well-written.

Levels in Dungeon Rushers are individual dungeons. Start a dungeon and you either clear it out or all of your characters run out of health and you have to start it over. Health and mana do not regenerate (though potions are available) so it’s wise to refrain from blowing through all of your mana. Some characters come equipped with abilities that can tilt the odds in your favor during specific situations. For example, the minstrel character can lull a group of enemies to sleep before the battle begins, giving you the guaranteed advantage of first strike.

It’s worth pointing out that Dungeon Rushers will allow the player to build their own dungeons to share with other players, but I didn’t get to experience that adventure just yet.

I’m looking forward to playing Dungeon Rushers again when it officially launches, which looks like Goblinz Studio is aiming for the first quarter of 2016. So in a few months. Until then you can check out Dungeon Rushers on Steam Greenlight.