Dungeons of Dredmor

Dungeons of Dredmor, DoD, is a roguelike game made by Gaslamp Games that was released in July 2011. DoD is a very traditional roguelike, it uses turn-based gameplay set on a tiled map that is randomly generated. DoD is written as a spoof of roguelike and traditional fantasies, be prepared for dwarf jokes. I highly recommend DoD to fans of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or Nethack. The game offers players that are new to roguelikes several less punishing settings, such as disabling permadeath, while giving veterans of the genre a challenge on the hardest settings. There are several aspects of DoD that make it stand out from the other roguelikes that I've played. These aspects include customizable player classes, a crafting system, a fair level of comedy, and a modding community.

When you start your adventure in DoD you will pick several different skill trees for your character, these range from simple weapon skill trees to crafting skills to necronomeconomics and rogue scientist. The weapon skills are similar to weapon trees in other games, passive bonuses, special attacks, and one or two active bonuses. The crafting skills give your character passive bonuses in addition to allowing you to craft useful items. The rest of the skill trees are various ability trees some are magic based others are rogue or warrior skill trees. When you make your character you get to choose 7 skill trees, which allows for some very interesting builds, rogue-vampire-archaeologist-assasin? No problem. In my personal playing I've found that the skill trees are fairly well balanced, I've heard that a pure warrior build can have trouble towards the end of the game, but even some of the builds I thought wouldn't get very far have surprised me.

The crafting system is well designed if a little eccentric at times (You can coat your armor in meat to gain HP buffs). Each of the crafting skills provides passive stat bonuses as I mentioned before and allow you to craft items up to your crafting skill level. Most of the skills are geared towards warrior, rogue or mage items at the early levels with some crossover at later levels. In addition to crafting items you can encrust items which applies a stat bonus or special ability to an item you already have. Even if your a crafting nut and take all the cafting skills with some support skills you can make it in DoD, I tried a pure crafting build just to see how well I could do and made it through half the dungeon before dying and I talked to a few people that have gotten even farther.

As I said previously DoD is written as a spoof of the genre and has a sense of humor and tons of cultural references. The enemies are a change from the traditional kobolds, dragons and orcs. You will be facing evil vegetables, paladins of the lutefisk god, and diggles (moles with drills for a nose). All of the enemies are rather rude and will yell insults at your mother. There are several very entertaining skills trees such as Emomancy which lets you “harrness the power of whatever, and like, stuff.” and contains skills such as “My Chemical Explosion” and “Mark of the Black Eyeliner”. The archaeology tree is filled with Indiana Jones references and you can stun your victims with sparkling vampire powers. The items throughout the game have the same sense of humor. You'll find blue police boxes in alternate dimensions, use your ingot smelter to make grilled cheese, and use alcohol to restore your mana. I found the humor sets a lighter tone to the game that helps reduce your frustration from dying ten times on the second floor of the dungeon.

The game also allows for modding. However there is no simple modding tool. If you want a mod you'll have to learn some XML or find a friend to make it for you. The mods are all written by using XML files and are not new user friendly. I attempted making an italian plumber mod and spent several hours looking up all the declarations and formatting for the XML files. There are several guides on the DoD wiki and the community was very helpful. Despite the complexity of modding for DoD, I consider modding to be a pro for the game because there are numerous mods ready to be downloaded from the games website or through Steam Workshop

Dungeons of Dredmor is a fantastic traditional roguelike that is well worth the 4.99 ( 9.99 for the game and all the expansions) It's a game that I come back to over and over again and enjoy every time I play. The only things I would knock points off for are: the sound can be a bit repetitive and there are a few occasional bugs. I give Dungeons of Dredmor an 8.5/10