Dungeon Rushers from Plug In Digital and Goblinz Studio is a dungeon explorer/turn-based RPG on Nintendo Switch. Learn more in our Dungeon Rushers review!
Dungeon Rushers tells the story of Elian who one day decides he’s had enough of his day to day, so he ends up joining the dungeon looters. This decision takes him to an ancient crypt that is supposed to be haunted. Considering that he used to clean up toilets for a living, diving head-on into danger in a crypt does seem like a step up. So off he goes to try and find fame and fortune in a new profession. Will he be able to succeed?
At first, your team will only consist of a single member (Elian) with only a few items at your disposal: a health potion, a mana potion, and a stamina potion. Your abilities include Pathfinder, which reveals adjacent rooms up to a range of two squares, and Saboteur, which will help you disarm a mechanical trap. Your character will also have access to some talents on three skill trees, and as you level up and gain more talent points you will get to unlock other talents such as increasing the damage of Poisoned blade, increasing the chance of inflicting Weakness on your opponent, increasing your character’s strength when equipped with a bow, and more.
You will move with the left analog stick or the D-Pad and can move the camera around with the right analog stick. Your abilities can be used with the ZL button. As you explore a dungeon you will be able to complete challenges to gain bonuses, so be sure to pay attention to the lower left corner of the screen. As you move around the dungeon, you will find rooms with enemies ready to attack you. Once you check any additional information you need, which you can access by pressing the X button, you’ll enter the fight. In battle, you can select from your available skills to try and defeat all enemies before they can do the same to you.
You have to pay attention to your health bar, mana bar and stamina bar since some skills require mana or stamina to be activated. Your health bar is important since if you’re not careful, you will end up dead good after a few hits. Because of this, you should be sure to use a potion to heal some of your health when things get rough. After you’re victorious, you will receive some experience points, as well as some loot – coins for your purse or items to equip or use. If you get a weapon, be sure to equip it right away since your toilet cleaning brush is certainly not going to cut it in the dungeons!
The first handful of dungeons in the game will act as an extended tutorial so that you can get the hang of things. As you explore the dungeon, you will also run into event slots. In these, you might find a fountain that recovers your health, an area you can loot or an item that helps you recover your mana. By your second dungeon you will gain a new ally to help you on your new adventure, serving as a support character with some low to mid strength attacks, and he will also serve as an extra target for enemies to focus on – and yes, this is very helpful once you’re out of the first set of dungeons.
After a handful of stages, you will unlock a store run by a witch. You can access it from the campaign map, and once there you’ll be able to sell your items for gold, buy the items she has in stock, or gamble by spending a lot of coins to try and win some more useful or powerful items for your adventure. You will also unlock a workshop with a blacksmith that will allow one of your party member to learn more about crafting items so that you can create new crafting ingredients, melee weapons, long-range weapons, artifacts and accessories, armor, and more. The more items you craft of each type, the better your party member will become, opening the door to crafting more powerful items that will require more and better ingredients.
Once you complete a dungeon, you can take on it again in the Heroic difficulty. What this does is present you with a different dungeon set up in which you can’t use potions, where there are more enemies with larger groups to battle and with more powerful opponents. Oh, and while there is a new treasure chest somewhere in the dungeon for you to loot, you will need to find a key to open it, and the key is randomly assigned to a different enemy group every time you take on that dungeon.
Dungeon Rushers is a fun minimalist dungeon crawler that is easy to play but hard to master. Navigating each dungeon is very simple thanks to how the game’s maps are set up, but there is certainly some strategy involved in how you explore each new area. The battles require even more planning than the exploration part since you need to consider the enemy type, their stats and skills, and if they’re in the front or the back of the group. You can spend dozens of hours playing this one before you have finished every single dungeon, and add some extra hours on top if you aim at completing all the extra challenges!
Disclaimer
This Dungeon Rushers review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Plug In Digital.
