Dungeon Drafters [Review]
Manalith Studios’ Dungeon Drafters offers varied deck-building strategy, though isn’t groundbreaking.
Image credit: Dangen Entertainment / Manalith Studios
Newly released on consoles by Dangen Entertainment, Manalith Studios’ Dungeon Drafters is a charming turn based dungeon crawler and deck builder with light rougelike elements. The game features several themed dungeons and hundreds of distinct cards.
You start by picking one of six playable characters, each with a different base deck, as you arrive in a kingdom on a quest to defeat the game’s big bad. Honestly, I paid no attention to the story because it didn’t seem important and I found the opening text backstory dull to read. The story isn’t the reason to play this game.
While there are plenty of NPCs to meet in the game’s town hub, you won’t be spending much time there except to get optional quests or buy cards and gems. The main focus of the game is the dungeons. The starting dungeon has a single floor. The rest of the dungeons have several floors that are increasingly challenging. Each floor is made up of random rooms of different types, including battle, puzzle, healing, and treasure rooms. At the end of each floor, you’re given the option to escape with your loot—cards, money, and more—or risk advancing to the next floor and losing it all, which is where the game’s roguelite elements kick in.
Image credit: Dangen Entertainment / Manalith Studios
Each room type with enemies must be cleared before the doors will open to advance. Action takes place on a grid; any movement, attack, or played card costs an action point, and when you use those up your turn is over. When enemies take their turn, they’re also limited by the same action point system—if they use all their points on movement, they can’t attack. Bumping into enemies triggers a basic attack, though you’ll be more interested in using your cards instead.
Cards can do damage, fire projectiles, cause status effects, and more. Many come with bonus conditions triggered by specific circumstances, for example a card may duplicate itself if you kill an enemy with it. After you play a card it goes in your graveyard, so it’s possible to run out of cards if you don’t make it to a location that will refresh your deck.
The starting decks come in combinations of elemental flavors—fire and ice, earth and wind, etc. How you start doesn’t really matter, because you can completely transform your deck’s build very early in the game as you find booster packs and individual cards in dungeons. Cards of each type have an elemental alignment requirement, where they become usable depending on what elemental gems the player assigns to each of five available slots; the most powerful cards in each category obviously require more elemental gems assigned, forcing you to use weaker cards of the other elements. The way you build a deck can open up many varied and powerful tactical possibilities, so you’ll spend a lot of time tweaking and refining as you master the battle system.
Image credit: Dangen Entertainment / Manalith Studios
Dungeon Drafters features great pixel art graphics, though without much in the way of visual effects. The game looks good and the style lends itself well to a turn-based grid movement game. If you like the style, you’ll be into it, even though the game doesn’t do anything groundbreaking with it.
It’s nice to have a varied number of playable characters, all visually distinct, even though beyond their starter decks they’re all the same. It would have been interesting if each character was actually limited to certain combinations of cards, and you could switch to any of them depending on the strategies necessary for specific dungeons.
My only major issue with the game is the way the UIs are handled. In most games, you’ll have buttons that you understand will accept or cancel. Here, different UI screens such as the deck builder, loot view, or guide screen uses a different button to immediately open each. This is fine, but the problem comes in that each UI is closed using the same button that summons it instead of the game’s “cancel” button. It’s not a game-breaking thing, but it’s incredibly annoying to a player who’s developed instinctive behaviors based on user interface conventions that are universal. The game isn’t doing anything special enough with its user interface to warrant the choice to break from those conventions.
Dungeon Drafters has a lot to love for fans of dungeon crawlers and deck builders, even if it doesn’t break any new ground. If you enjoy either, definitely take a look.
Dungeon Drafters is available now for PC (Steam, Humble, GOG, itch, Epic), PlayStation 4 / 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One / Series X|S.
Overall Score: 7/10
Played on: PS5
