[Reviewed v1.0; Final version at time of review]
Dungeon Lord’s most significant shortcoming isn’t that it’s a bad game. Its most significant shortcoming is that it is a lousy game with an interesting gameplay loop hampered by ill-conceived design decisions and lack of effort.
Dungeon Lord could have been a good or even a flawed but enjoyable game. Instead, it’s a lacklustre product that I can’t recommend.
Positives
Gameplay: The silver lining. In this game, you play as the ruler of a dungeon. A dungeon lord, if you will. You and your mistress will build traps, enlist monsters, and develop your abilities to defend your home from a gaggle of slutty adventurers.
There are two main sections of the game: day and night. In the day, you build traps, choose a variety of monsters to oppose the coming horde, send your mistress out on odd jobs, and decide what skills you can use in the future attack. At night, a series of adventurers will filter through the rooms of your dungeon, which contain a trap or a monster. In each room, a dice is rolled to see how an adventurer fares against the room’s hazard. If the adventurer is defeated, they are captured, and the process starts over with the next poor soul. Suppose the adventurer keeps avoiding traps/defeating monsters. In that case, they will eventually make it to the dungeon’s centre, where they will fight you. The night ends when all adventurers have made it through your dungeon. Either being captured or robbing your dungeon of valuables.
At a basic level, seeing adventurer after adventurer fall to your perfectly placed traps and monsters is very cathartic. You have many options in both categories and can create some effective synergies. Those with a mind for strategy will find the system engaging.
Unfortunately, that’s the only bright spot in this game.
Neutral
Story: Non-existent. You’re a dungeon lord. Protect your dungeon.
Art: Basic. Real and anime women in gifs/pictures ripped from various sources online. Quality varies. Style varies. They’re neither particularly heinous nor worth a second look.
Negatives
Banality:
“Grinding refers to the playing time spent doing repetitive tasks within a game to unlock a particular game item or to build the experience needed to progress smoothly through the game (What is grinding? - definition from Techopedia).”
Dungeon Lord is one of the few titles I’ve played that makes its main gameplay loop a grind. You protect your dungeon, defeat adventurers, and level up so you can better combat the next batch of adventurers. Unfortunately, with no narrative or more significant purpose to aim toward, the gameplay becomes an end in and of itself. The gameplay concept is sound, but other than that nugget of gold, the game is a solid block of unappealing banality.
Why are you playing? To continue playing. When does the game end? When you lose, hit an arbitrary limit, or, in the more likely scenario, boredom overtakes you, and you never play it again. And that’s the kill shot; Dungeon Lord is boring.
Conclusion
Solid concept, but it is let down by every other aspect. Unless you are looking for ideas for one’s own creative endeavors, I cannot recommend you ever play this game.
References
“What Is Grinding? - Definition from Techopedia.”
Techopedia.com, https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27527/grinding.