I make no secret that I love the 'blobber' genre. No, not movies from the 1950s where I guy in a pink shirt runs out of a cinema twice. The dungeon crawling, monster smiting, heroes eating stale bread type of game. Getting obsessed of Eye of the Beholder 2 as a youth and getting scared of the skeletons. And then Legend of Grimrock 2 as an adult (and getting scared of wiping on a Ironman Single-Crystals run). Yes, I also played others in the series and adjunct titles.

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians was picked up in a bundle years ago and as I worked through my backlog I decided to give this lesser known title a shot.

The story, if one cares enough since the game gives up on it eventually, is a group of people who descend deep into a dungeon on a work shift. When suddenly, Oh no! The imprisoned have escaped and made their way back up. Better go and catch them!

I can't be too harsh on this. Most early titles in this genre didn't do much once the crawling got started. Nice to see it try, though more character barks and feedback would of been appreciated.

Anyway, naked but not, your team of poorly equipped people start making their way up through the levels. Fighting skeletons and flying eyeball bats. But mostly rattly skeletons. Some of these skeletons have bows to shoot you. Some of these skeletons have magical abilities to shoot you.

And sometimes these projectiles appear to curve around corners...

I can appreciate a blobber trying something new. The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians does this by having the players fighting options be based on cooldowns WoW style. You remember WoW, it is that MMO that is not Guild Wars 2 (note: GW2 also has cooldowns, but it is also a cool game).

But expectations are off. The balance is whack. Levelling is weird.

Generally you would expect to side-step dodge attacks. Dance around the enemy, especially ones that move around, charge, and pathfind their way across stairs, platforms, and obstacles.

Instead everything here is based on your abilities and chaining together attack types. This sounds like it should be cool! Changing up the formula and finding ways to lock down the enemy and minimise damage... Except, it does not quite work. While early enemies you can tank your way through with minimal damage, bosses require some additional work. All good. Until basic enemies also require this and the game begins to be a slog to find what critters you can chop up to get some loot to get just enough of a boost to win the level.

All the right ideas are here. But it could of done with another level of polish and refinement.

Maybe that's just genre expectations. But looking at the dev's post mortum on the title and other user feedback I feel I am not alone.

I was kinda surprised that The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians uses a lot of prebuilt assets. In fact, nearly everything is from an asset store. Normally games that do this stand out as a giant eyesore, but the dev here has done a great job with the implementation of placement and lighting. While it feels really indie, especially some of the models that stand static, it does not feel like yet-another-asset-flip.

Particles and item assets feel clean and coherent with the rest of the game. Everything being colour coded to make it easy to know what type of effect will happen when you click on an action.

Music and SFX also work well. Giving the game a grimy underground feeling without the clunky clicking (except one on menu startup) effects I would go in expecting.

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is not a great game. And I eventually became too frustrated with the combat mechanics. Aggro'ing the enemy is not for me. Let me smash some skeletons!

But it is an enjoyable blobber that does do some new things. Worth a look if you like the genre and want things changed up a bit.

Game Acquisition: Fanatical (Nemesis 5)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 2 August 2022
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP
Processor: 2 Ghz
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: Shader Model 3.0 GPU ; NVidia GeForce GTX 260 (2008) or GT 730 (2014), AMD Radeon HD 5670 (2009) or HD7570 (2012) ; the game may run with less good 3D cards, but you’ll have to lower the view distance and the rendering quality
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 1 GB available space
Additional Notes: IGPs are not supported ; the game runs on Intel HD5000 but the framerate is around 20-30 fps even on minimum settings.