Super Dungeon Bros

Super Dungeon Bros is a co-op, rock themed brawler that challenges players to loot their way through the dungeons of Rökheim in the search to uncover the legends of long lost fabled Rock Stars. Being essentially a simplified dungeon crawler, the game sees you traverse procedurally generated levels as you strive to defeat bosses and gain rewards.

The story in Super Dungeon Bros follows heroes Axl, Lars, Freddie and Ozzie on a somewhat clichéd adventure that is split up by a few cutscenes that get repeated across the three dungeons. Offering very little depth, it plays on the usual rock-themed tropes with the group receiving a mission from the Gods of Rock. The weak story that is present in Super Dungeon Bros is largely representative of the game as a whole. It is what could be described as an extremely stripped down version of Diablo, in that it mirrors its dungeon crawler archetype. To add to this it also has a similar atheistic to the Lego games, which it does not quite successfully imitate, but leaves it feeling like a simplified, bare bones version of your average action adventure game.

At the core of the game is its dungeons, which spread across three levels; Cryptheim, Chillheim and Bogheim. Through the use of simple controls consisting of two attack types, quick and strong, the player must traverse a mixture of traps and enemies in a bid to reach the end and score the loot. Each area features procedurally generated dungeons for you to explore, although this adds little to the diversity of the game. Across the three levels you are exposed to innately similar experiences, with only what appears to be a texture change and a few different enemies as any indication of a noticeable difference. At the start of each of these dungeons the game offers players the chance to increase the difficulty to obtain higher rewards, or decrease it, which incurs penalties to your score, but makes the run easier to complete. These add a little bit of diversification, but ultimately do not make a huge difference to gameplay, with many just adding health and damage buffs or nerfs.

The game also features a shortlist of missions which usually revolve around beating one of the three dungeons bosses with a certain weapon and so forth - nothing overly complex. The bosses at the end of each area are actually not that bad though. Some of the design elements have been borrowed from other games, but they are still quite satisfying engagements, although it is just a shame that there are not that many of them. The dungeon crawler also boasts a daily and weekly challenge mode with global leaderboards, but again this failed to add much to the game in way of content.

Super Dungeon Bros does contain a local co-op mode as well as online multiplayer that allows you and a few Bros to team up in your efforts. This adds some fun to the game as you can combine abilities and plan strategies to tackle the dungeons with the difficulty increases in place, giving you a chance to gain more loot.

React Games delivers a pretty standard audio experience that the player has the option of expanding. Already featuring some relatively funky rock themed tracks, it seems a shame they lock the other variations behind a pay wall, as the game has several other soundtracks including a dubstep one and an eighties variant.

As a dungeon crawler it is almost expected that the game will have some kind of class system, but this is unfortunately not the case in Super Dungeons Bros and only adds to this feeling that depth is lacking. It gives off the appearance of character classes when in actual fact there are none. There are four characters, but all that is really different about them is their colour, and the only actual way to change playstyle is to select a different weapon. Each of the four weapon types has a different special ability, with the sword, hammer and crossbow all doing some form of area-of-effect damage and the wand creating a healing pool for yourself and allies. It is worth noting that some of these abilities can be combined, although none to any kind of spectacular effect. One thing that is noticeable in terms of the balancing of the game's combat system is how much stronger melee weapons appear to be. This may be as the developer assumed people would group up, but in solo play the ranged weapons, such as the crossbow and wand, feel considerably weaker.

There are also a few helmets as well as other items unlockable in the game's armoury, although all are locked and require a long grind or for you to purchase gems to access them. In terms of time investment, the game seems to lean heavily on micro-transactions, with every item apart from the two starting weapons available to buy with real money. What seems particularly unusual is that the only way to access the female counterparts of the heroes Axl, Lars, Ozzie and Freddie is to purchase the character pack to unlock the opposite gender characters. Since they add nothing to the game in terms of abilities or gameplay, this seems a rather unnecessary move.

When it comes to the visuals, Super Dungeon Bros is reminiscent of games like Castle Crashers displaying cartoon stylised graphics with a limited amount of character detail. The animations are smooth and the game suffers little frame rate problems, although the load times occasionally seem quite long for such a simple game. This has been addressed in a recent press release, however, in which the game's developers state they intend to better optimise the game's loading times.

Overall Super Dungeon Bros seems lacking in depth and content and is akin to a mobile game presumably aimed at the younger audience. The micro-transactions in particular give it that exploitative mobile feel where the developers are hoping younger gamers will just cave in and buy all the weapons to make the game more enjoyable, and it seems to do the game somewhat of an injustice by locking off all the content. It is understandable that companies have to make money, but a smaller game like this would have benefited from having everything open from the get go, as in terms of time investment your average consumer is just not going to spend enough time here to unlock the items that make the game more enjoyable. Because of this fact Super Dungeon Bros is not as fun as it could have been, but still serves as a temporary distraction for anyone wanting to play a nice, simple, watered down version of Diablo and brawl through a few dungeons with friends collecting a little loot along the way.