Defeat Monsters, Explore Caves and Earn Loot In Dungeon Village
Dungeon Village ($3.99) by Kairosoft Co.,Ltd s the latest city building simulation game from Kairosoft, the developers behind hit titles like Game Dev Story, Mega Mall Story, and Epic Astro Story.
In Dungeon Village, as in many Kairosoft titles, you’re tasked with turning a lackluster town into a thriving hub of civilization by attracting new townspeople. Dungeon Village is RPG themed, so you’ll be dealing with adventurers, monsters, and plenty of loot.
The game will start out with a few shops, such as a weapon shop, an armor shop, an inn, and a bakery, but as it progresses you will build new locations to lure additional adventurers to the town.
If you’ve played another Kairosoft game, then you’re already familiar with the controls. Because the iPhone screen is small, placing buildings and roads (which is done with tapping) can be finicky and frustrating, but other than that, tapping menus and interacting with the game is painless.
Dungeon Village is a complex simulation game with a lot going on. You will keep track of a growing population, as well as all of the adventurers that journey to your town. Adventurers will automatically patronize your shops and stay at the inn, and then they will go out and fight monsters in the field.
When an adventurer kills a monster, he or she gains experience and your town earns money, so the key to a thriving city is attracting adventurers and keeping them happy.
While adventurers will buy basic equipment from the shops, you can purchase and gift them with upgrades that will help them fight. Gifted items (aka their equipment) will increase stats, satisfaction, and work ethic.
There are a constant stream of special quests that you can recruit adventurers to complete, such as exploring caves for treasure or battling monsters for gold. Like in Epic Astro Story, you will be able to watch the adventurers while they complete their quests, slaying monsters and opening chests of loot.
Each of these quests takes gold to complete, but will reward you with popularity, new equipment to give adventurers, and new items.
Items can be used to permanently upgrade adventurers or increase the stats of your buildings, causing them to be more popular and earn more money.
There is a cauldron in Dungeon Village that can cannabalize excess items to turn them into magic points (aka research points), which can be used to discover rare facilities and equipment.
You will also be able to hold events to increase town popularity, hand out medals to motivate your adventurers, earn new equipment, buy new buildings, and fulfill requirements to earn star ratings for an even bigger town. Merchants will visit, monsters will attack, and there are plenty of special events to keep things interesting.
Epic Astro Story was one of my favorite recent Kairosoft games, and Dungeon Village is almost the same game with a different skin, meaning it’s entirely engrossing and has a lot of depth. You can easily lose hours rearranging buildings to make them all profitable, figuring out the best equipment combos for adventurers, and morphing your small village into a populous town.
The game may be deep, but It can be tough to master because there are no hints on what you’re doing wrong. Dungeon Village doesn’t tell you if you have your facilities in the wrong place, or what you can do to improve your income, so there’s a lot of trial and error involved, which can be fun or frustrating, depending on the type of person you are.
I think those of us who play Kairosoft games fall into two categories: people who don’t mind replaying the same type of game over and over, and people who are fed up with Kairosoft’s repetitive releases. If you’re in the first category, this is another game that you’ll love, but if you’re in the latter category, you won’t find anything new here, so you may want to skip this release.
