The Dungeon Beneath

The Dungeon Beneath is a fun little roguelike-like game combined with an auto battler. You have a team of 4 characters and a hero placed on a 2x3 board, and you fight the enemy's hero and whatever minions they fit on their board. There's a good amount of variety in the characters and their special abilities, but especially due to the limited board size, the synergies don't get too crazy nor exciting. The gameplay consists of arranging your team before the battle, and then maybe rearranging some units between each round of battle. The caveat to rearranging mid-battle is that (most) rearranged characters then skip their turn, so for many battles you don't give any input at all. There's about 40 floors, a bit less than half of which are combat encounters, and the rest are shops or treasure rooms for swapping out your party, getting new equipment for them, or something of the sort.

I found the game more fun than I expected, but I find the main problem to be that it lacks replay value. I beat the game on my first try, and then beat New Game+ on my third try. That's not to say it's easy - the victories were quite close and the New Game's go up to at least New Game++++, I believe, which will certianly be more challenging. No, the problem is more that the runs don't differ from each other too much. Sure, you get a different hero, and different artifacts, and you even unlock new units between runs, but the units still feel kind of similar, and while the dungeon is branching and somewhat random, the enemies themselves are always the same. I did a few runs, beat the game twice, and I feel I kind of experienced all the game has to offer in those few hours.

Overall, I'd give this a partial recommendation. It was fun, but nothing amazing. If it was longer, had more enemies or randomized enemies, a larger board, more synergies, or other things that would make it more replayable, I would definitely have liked it more, but as it is now, it's just a bit too unambitious.