Super Dungeon Bros….Oh what a strange, strange game you are. A fusion between a dungeon crawler, hack’n’slash and a dozen gallons of beer, Super Dungeon Bros leapt onto the scene as a free game this month for Xbox One’s Games with Gold scheme…However does this lil’ number from React Games hold up? Well, my bro’s and broette’s (And I swear that once I finish this article I’m NEVER saying the word Bro or Broette again…), let’s find out!
Super Dungeon Bros tasks you and your Bro’s (Or Broette’s) with recovering sacred records that contain some epic rock tracks; other than that, the objective is to just find loot, obtain fame and claim your fortune! Whilst the plot is simplistic, the gameplay does somewhat redeem this merit – Simple, but easy to learn, the combat revolves around four types of weapons, Swords, Ranged, Hammers and Staffs, each of which have unique attacks, but unfortunately share the same Special Attack (From what I could tell), meaning that every Sword will send you into a spinning tornado with their Special, and so on. This was a bit of a disappointment to me, considering that the 30+ weapons in the game were just simple stat and texture changes, it sorta just made me want to save up my Gems (The currency used to purchase these weapons) to buy the strongest weapon of my preferred class.
This, though, brings me to my first gripe with Super Dungeon Bros. The game has micro-transactions, in a £15 game where all you can spend them on are a few weapons and eight hats. That’s it – If you wanted, you could just drop £2 on the game, buy the strongest weapon of your preferred class, and boom, just learn how to play intelligently and nothing can stop you. This is especially an issue with the Co-Op the game focuses so, SO much on, which in my opinion is just plain unbalanced – The game becomes far too easy, even in Single Player, with the few games I joined only having 3 other people, we literally just slaughtered everything in our path, and only died a handful of times throughout the entire dungeon.
Dungeons are split up into various floors, with minibosses, and a final boss to challenge at the end – Between these floors, you can spend cash you obtain on floors to buy simple upgrades, with your three options, Health, Damage and Defence being upgradable three levels each, for a cost of 500, 1000 and 2000 coins – It’s simple, but in a way that I wished there was more depth, wether it be with an overall Player Level, or something simple like skill trees to differentiate different classes.
Another gripe I had with the game were the various lag and audio-based issues that I encountered throughout the whole game – During my time in the first dungeon, I encountered multiple, bizarre lag spikes that froze the game temporarily for a second or two; this became especially annoying during boss fights, were timing dodges was key, leading for me to be hit multiple times due to hanging. As I said before, I also encountered audio issues with the game too, with some enemies not making noise when they hit me, no indication I was being hit, and the worst offender, the last boss of the first dungeon (Who wields two giant spiked chain balls), made absolutely no noise at all throughout the duration of the fight. When his chained maces smacked the ground, shook the screen and caused damaging shockwaves? Nope. No noise. When he got hit or summoned his minions? Nope. Still no noise. It made the whole fight rather awkward, and honestly I kind of got bored of it halfway through…
Given this, however, I wanted to love Dungeon Bros; disregarding the annoying voice acting, audio issues, lag, boring story and finicky controls, there was still something that drew me to the game – Maybe it was the trap design? The gameplay? Maybe it was just some mindless fun? Regardless, I do feel that this game was seriously created for mobile devices, and I feel that if it was ported to these platforms, I might play it a bit more, but as a console game, Super Dungeon Bros unfortunately falls flat on it’s face…Quite embarrassingly.
Overall, with my time in Super Dungeon Bros, I would rate the game a 5 / 10 – I certainly wouldn’t pay £15 for it, but if it was on sale for like £3, I may’ve given it a shot had I not gotten it for free.