The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians

Introduction:
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is an RPG Dungeon Crawler game, in First Person View, inspired by classics like Dungeon Master™ and Might & Magic®, but featuring a modern combat system based on the triptych “tank/damage dealer/healer” mechanism.

Story:
You’re a newly employed guard of a prison deep inside a dungeon. The night of your arrival, strange things happen and when you wake up in the morning, all prisoners have escaped amidst chaos. The warden wisely decides to leave the dungeon as quickly as possible, while tasking you to run after the escaping prisoners. You then assemble your team and venture into the mysterious dungeon.

A Call For Adventure:
Enter a big, massive dungeon, full of danger, mystery and secrets.
Fight your way through hordes of enemies and powerful creatures.
Explore intricate corridors, underground palaces, mines fallen into oblivion and evil crypts. Solve puzzles, avoid deadly traps, uncover hidden passages, and keep your bearing through mazes & hallways.

Character Building :
You’ll take command of a party of 4 guardians. Each guardian comes with a set of spells & abilities, with new ones appearing over the course of the adventure.
For each new level reached, the guardians get a point to use in their talent trees, allowing them to reinforce their abilities or gain new powers.
There are 4 classes to choose from: the warrior, the healer, the mage & the rogue. Each class has 3 specializations represented by a talent tree, and each specialization comes with its own set of abilities. So you have 12 base build-ups. In addition, your guardians can choose freely to spend their talent points in any of the 3 specializations of their class, allowing for even more varied set-ups.

The dungeon is filled with loot: epic armors, legendary weapons and mystical, magical items. Often when you kill a group of enemies, they’ll drop a random piece of equipment that one of your guardians can use, raising more and more of their powers.

Evolved Combat System :
The combat is focused on the triptych “tank/damage dealer/healer” mechanism, coupled with an exciting threat mechanism: your healer’s spells directly threaten all the enemies nearby, and thus your tank must use his abilities to attract their wrath and protect the healer. The tank must then be able to mitigate a lot of the enemy damage using his defensive skills.
Your last 2 guardians will be the damage dealers, trying to kill the enemies as fast as possible, while they’re busy with the tank.
All guardians get a lot of abilities and not only will using the right one at the right moment be essential to your party’s survival, but also combining different abilities in sequence to maximize their efficiency will be required to vanquish your strongest foes.
It sounds like a lot, but fortunately the game comes with an active pause: you can pause the game whenever you feel like it, check everything, queue the next abilities for your guardians, and then resume the game.

You don’t like tanks, or you don’t like pausing the game? No problem, just lower the game difficulty, and you’ll be able to play without a real tank or pausing. You can precisely tune the difficulty at any time during your exploration.

Unlike old-school FPV Dungeon Crawlers, you don’t have to strafe-turn-strafe-turn all the time in Dungeon Guardians. Your tank comes with serious defensive skills (armor, dodge & parry) that let him handle most of the enemy attacks, as long as the healer backs him up. So most fights are done while standing your ground.
However, occasionally your whole party will have to dodge some extremely powerful enemy attacks, usually by walking back, so you’ll still need some moving reflexes and awareness of your surroundings during the fights.


Built-in Map editor & Modding :
The game comes with a full featured map editor, letting you create your own dungeons. The basics are very simple, but a bit of learning will be required to handle the more advanced puzzle mechanisms.

Additionally, with the Modding SDK, you’ll be able to fine-tune the existing enemies, classes, specializations, abilities, talents, gear, and enchantments, and with a bit of dedication you should be able to add your own, and even add sound FX or music.

Game Features:

• 4-character Party
• Grid-based movement : your party moves 1 square at the time, and turns by a quarter
• First person view
• 4 classes, 12 specializations
• 5 playable races : human, dwarf, elf, dark elf, halfling
• Active pause (ie: you can pause the game and still queue commands for your party members)
• 25-50 hours of gameplay, depending on your own skills and the difficulty settings
• 20 bosses
• 100 kinds of creatures (including variations)
• Puzzles (the few ones required to finish the game are easy to solve)
• A lot of tactical combat
• Built-in Map Editor & Modding support

More information.

RPGWatch Steam Curation:

A well made Dungeon Crawler with an innovative real-time with pause combat system and a huge dark dungeon with many puzzles and mysteries to explore.

Click to expand...

This game is well worth playing. After Fallout Four I jumped into this one, and it has entertained me for a solid two weeks. If a game like Stonekeep was something you enjoyed, being plopped into a dungeon and having to fight/survive your way out, you should give this a try.

Its very well done. Probably near the pinnacle of what can be done with this type of combat implementation approach. Tough bosses require a bit of fancy footwork. Keep using your map to do a sort of 'Australian Pullback.' You need time to recover abilities, but you must stay in close enough contact with bosses so they don't regenerate all their hits.
Well done laudable effort, worth the price of admission.

How's the game doing in story telling and exploration?
While I loved Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore, Stonekeep and even Ishar, I disliked Grimrock quite a bit because it only had (boring) fights and (great) puzzles, but none of the story or exploration. So after a couple of hours I felt like "ok, I have seen it all, now I will do level after level and maybe see a new skin or two"
So how is this game doing in this department?

Graphics wise it looks nice (like Grimrock) but doesn't really spread an own charme like Forgotten Forces

It has puzzles, some were easy, many not so much. Exploration is there, it isn't a huge part, but it certainly is present. The storyline is compelling from the very beginning, and each and every level that you complete just adds to it. Figuring out what really happened and what truly is going on is a major draw to this game, imo.

Cool, thanks!

Kordanor,
I'm the game author.
it's nice to see that Carnifex enjoys the story of Dungeon Guardians, but I'm afraid it'd set your expectations too high.

Actually, there's not too much story telling ; there's a bit more than in LoG, though, with your party members talking to each other from time to time, letting you know the Dungeon lore & events.

Alright, thanks for the honesty!

Will probably check out a let's play for the very beginning of the game to see if it's within my expectations.

The groups' dialogue during the adventure helped a lot with immersion for me, especially some of the comments before, during, and after a battle with the levels top leaders. I'd reiterate that if you enjoy games that throw you into a solo area and you have to claw/fight your way out, you'd like this one.

I am playing through it at the moment. I like it. One thing, which is a minor point, I think the pit areas should be a darker gray or some other dark color to differentiate them from unexplored areas.

Tried it on Warrior but just too tough. Well thought out and fun game to play. Since I took a bit of a hiatus I can see some of the recent changes, which are good. Currently taking on the Boss of 5th level.
In regard to the story comments I was pipe up and say, Story? There is a story, but it seems more of a premise for the exposition of the game than a true story, but that's fine with me.

I own this, I need to try playing it again when I finish Stranger of Sword City which... I am just in love with.

I've put about five hours into it previously and beaten a couple of levels, but couldn't really take to the quick-icon/hotbar driven combat which felt like an "odd marriage" for a dungeon crawler. I'll try again at some point however, as it does have some nice touches in the dungeon exploration and is certainly challenging.

It seemed like a single-player dungeon crawler MMO to me, complete with cooldown icons. Kinda "Sword Coast Legends" in a dungeon crawler instead of top down format.

I want to check it out but it's not calling out to my heart and soul like Stranger in Sword City that I just want to never end.