Review: Deep, Deep Dungeon: Killing For Fun and Profit
by Allan Curtis
November 26, 2010
Overview
As you walk though the murky gloom, your bloodied sword in hand and your bag of coins jingling on your belt, you contemplate why you chose the adventuring life. Is it the rush of battle? The satisfaction of ridding the world of horrors? You smile to yourself as you settle on the obvious answer: Its for the riches!
Deep, Deep Dungeon from iQubi lets you step into the heavy leather boots of an adventurer, bent on grabbing as much gold as he or she can, in a long, long trek to the bottom of a (unsurprisingly) deep, deep dungeon.
The Good
DDD is a very simple game indeed. You start off by picking your gender and you're thrust into floor 1 of the dungeon. There are no classes, you're simply a human with a sword and some potions. You tap to move around to each little segment of the floor you're on. Each segment is either an enemy, treasure or nothing.
When you encounter an enemy you fight by tapping to stop a small sword moving rapidly along a yellow bar with a very small red area. If you tap when the sword is on the bar, you hit and if you manage to tap so it stops exactly on the small red area you score a critical hit and do a lot more damage. Enemies hit back, and you have no way of dodging their blows, except for luck. If you miss the bar, you miss the enemy.
As you kill enemies you level up and get stronger, increasing your hit points, how hard you hit and how wide the red critical hit area is, making it easier to get critical on monsters. When you find treasure its basically the same as a monster, except that the cursor is a key and if you stop it on the bar you get the treasure. If you miss, you destroy the chest and lose it.
At any time during your exploration you can return to camp and purchase new weapons, armor and items to help you in your quest. There is a variety of weapons and amour that all work in the same manner and items are limited to extra potions to heal you. You can also make IAP to obtain huge amounts of gold.
And that is the whole game. You advance though the dungeon, moving space by space, killing all enemies the exact same way and changing equipment when you earn enough money. For a little while this is slightly fun, as reflex games often are and you get that drive to level up and become stronger.
The game's graphics are very nice. A sharp distinct anime style brings flair to the proceedings and a cute fairy like girl acts as your mini guide though the dungeon. enemies look suitably menacing and the game as a whole looks clean and eyecatching. Soundwise the game is quite good, although a little generic, featuring all the clangs and bangs you'd except from this gene.
The Bad
From that description above, you can probably fathom that the only deep thing in DDD is the dungeon itself, because the gameplay is shallower than a wading pool in the Sahara desert. In summer. I could literally feel brain cells popping, as I was exposed to the absolute mind numbing tedium this game offers.
There is just nothing compelling about Deep Deep Dungeon. The game features no story whatsoever. You don't even get a screen of text like some RPGs give you, you're just a guy in a dungeon, killing stuff.
There is also nothing to battles besides mindless reflexes. If you hit the bar you always hit, if you don't you miss. if you haven't upgraded your equips you'll take more damage, and so on. There's no thoughtful elemental counter spells in DDD, or interesting foes that require a strategy to defeat, the game doesn't even have magic. Your only ability though the entire game is hitting stuff; there are no special attacks, varied battle plans or anything of that nature. If this battle system was a minigame in a bigger RPG it would be great fun but not when the entire game is based around nothing but this.
The game also seems to brainwash certain people into believing it's a rougetype. Its not. A rougetype is a very complex RPG, with many, many ways to win that is also randomly generated, such as Nethack. DDD has one way to win and one route though the dungeon. The only similarity it shares with true rougetypes is its floors are randomly generated.
What really tops off this already paper thin game is the IAPs. For a small amount of money you can buy up to a million gold. The average chest on level 4 drops about 600 gold. Each floor, this increases slowly. But for a few bucks you can buy a million gold to buy the best equipment straight off, making battles insanely easy and making you a ridiculous powerhouse that will hew though enemies as a woodcutter fells trees. The game itself is already $1 and very easy; do we really need an overpriced, game breaking IAP shop as well?
One major problem with the IAPs, besides the fact they exist, is that IAPs are only valid for the current session. That means if you accidentally press home to return to your home screen, your money will be gone. This is either a huge oversight, or an attempt from Iqubi to get some people to buy their IAP twice.
The Verdict
Deep Deep Dungeon is an exceedingly simple game, with no real strengths besides its graphics, very little gameplay and a total dearth of new or interesting ideas. It is fun for a few minutes, but gets boring very quickly indeed. If you want a dungeon crawler with interesting battles, get Sword and Poker 1 or 2, or even try a real rougetype like Nethack. Just don't buy this lame cash in.
