Dungeon on the Endless

Hey, surprise, it's a game. Dungeon of the Endless.

I played through this with my friend over the course of a few days, and it was just barely entertaining enough to keep us from quitting midway. But was it good? No, I'm fairly sure I would not say that.

To start off with the things the Endless series has always been pretty good at - art, music, lore - those were all well present here too. Well, maybe not the lore so much. In fact, I would point out that I did feel like it was trying to push too hard on some sort of comedic value. From item and skill descriptions, names, characters, to the lore bits... Always making puns and jokes, but they weren't really good, and did take away from the precious space where something actually useful could have been. An undescriptive (but maybe slightly humorous) one-word ability name in small text, but a whole paragraph telling some flighty joke about the item that maybe bears a relevancy to what it does? Sure, it's not like I need to know what any of them do anyways. This and everything similar led to a lot of trial and error, instead of the ability to make educated decisions.

Going forward to the actual gameplay, there wasn't much. While I'm by no means against automating parts of gameplay, I find that since combat is completely automated, there isn't anything left for the players to do. Sure, positioning, building, deciding which rooms to power, but when the action is happening, you're just sitting there watching things unfold with no possibility for meaningful input.
Further, the balance was off. The vast majority of buildings - useless. Spoiler alert, but just stack food production. Get some tanky low mobility guys with tons of firepower and health regen into a room through which all enemies must path, and have one speedy guy do the final crystal carry each level. It's still by no means easy (despite the misleading difficulty levels), but it's the best strategy we found, and is fairly risk-free.

Overall, Dungeon of the Endless is a nice-ish game, which just focuses on the wrong parts of what makes a game fun. After some initial discovery, the gameplay becomes a rather monotonous rut, and I at least lost interest before too long. Maybe find some nice tower defense or rogue-like game, whichever you see in this, but I wouldn't recommend Dungeon of the Endless.