'We need to improve it and make it more polished and make it feel even more powerful,' he says. But Moris also admits Amplitude is still in the process of balancing the tower defence element of the game. In typical roguelike fashion, your characters will grow in power over the course of repeated runs, better enabling them to hold back the alien tides. Amplitude wants Endless Dungeon to be a challenging experience. I only made it past the first bulkhead door once, and my crystal-bot was destroyed soon after. In the build I played, this was a big ask. You must open doors to accrue resources, but every door you open potentially adds another enemy-spawning hive to the map. Eventually, you must order it to unlock the bulkhead that'll let you access the next area, meaning your defence needs to be consistently strong all along the crystal-bot's path. You can't rely on turtling around the crystal either. Waves of enemies will trigger every few minutes, and if you haven't established a sturdy defence by the third or fourth wave, your crystal-bot is going to end up stardust. Consequently, the stakes ramp up quickly.

The core loop of the game also bubbles with tension. 'And also that, when you switch, you wouldn't get entirely lost in the dungeon, so we needed to add support features such as the mini-map.' 'The most challenging was trying to make the hero switch feel natural,' says Jean-Maxime Moris, creative director on Endless Dungeon. The ability to swap between characters with a tap of the spacebar is a particularly neat touch. You can also activate special abilities, such as Bunker's shield-slam that splatters nearby foes, and a skill that turns Zed's chaingun into a devastating beam weapon.Īlthough still early days for the project, the combat feels satisfying. The biggest change, though, is that you control these characters directly, moving with the keyboard and aiming with the mouse. The build I played offered three playable characters, including Zed, a sort-of cross between Overwatch's Tracer and TF2's Heavy who churns up foes with her underslung chaingun, and Bunker, a spindly robot who lugs around a weighty ballistic shield. And while there are fewer heroes than in Dungeon of the Endless, they are more distinct. Gone is the simple, top-down pixel-art, replaced with a painterly 3D aesthetic that makes the station's procedural gunmetal corridors pop with colour. While the DNA of Dungeon of the Endless is visible in the game's structure, in both presentation and function Endless Dungeon is quite a different experience.

Endless dungeon wit