If you’ve ever played RimWorld, then you’re familiar with the genre known as the “colony sim”: games where you manage the lives of a group of individuals, ranging in size from small settlements to entire cities, with the RimWorld-style colony simulator putting a particular focus on the wants, needs, and health of each individual member. This style of game portrays every person in your colony as a unique individual, one who takes special care to live a full and fulfilling life and one who can die horribly if neglected or left to the whims of random chance.
Dungeon Settlers follows this same formula, but with one particularly interesting twist: the entire colony is an adventurer guild, camping outside of a legendary dungeon in the style of Dungeon Meshi, with the only way to procure resources to survive or thrive being to venture into the deadly depths of the dungeon, which only becomes deadlier and more rewarding the deeper they go.
It’s a novel concept, and after dumping about 16 hours into the title, I can say that for an Early Access game, Dungeon Settlers has a strong foundation to build upon. But it needs to build on it, because there are certainly aspects of the game that felt unoptimized, poorly designed, or outright frustrating to play.
First of all, the core gameplay loop, in my opinion, is genius. Combining RimWorld-style colony management but making your only reliable source of resources a dungeon that gets progressively harder is a great combination. Advancement becomes a game of risk versus reward as you consider returning to your colony alive with meager rewards or pushing deeper to get something that could potentially greatly empower your entire team, but doing so often leads to your untimely death.
Dungeon Settlers is hard. Like, very hard. As in, expect your first party to die, and go out of your way to keep some gold on hand to replace members here or there after you get your one-and-only replacement squad. I personally lost track of how many new games I had to make because I kept getting to points where my squad was dead and gone, and I didn’t have the resources to replace them. This difficulty is definitely part of the challenge in Dungeon Settlers, and without it, the core gameplay loop wouldn’t be as engaging.
However, there are areas in the game where the difficulty is artificially, and often I think unintentionally, increased simply by virtue of how certain mechanics work.
To start with, Dungeon Settlers is a real-time strategy combat game with directional abilities. Positioning and using your abilities is really important for winning combat. However, trying to use four abilities across four different heroes and keeping track of all of their cooldowns is extremely hard in an actual fight. While there is an autocast ability option, it seems like the AI isn’t very clever about which abilities it uses. I think an easy workaround to this issue would be adding a HUD element where you could assign certain abilities from certain party members for quick casting without actually having them selected. Knowing when certain very important abilities are ready without checking on the party member, and being able to quickly cast them, would make strategizing in the heat of battle a lot easier.
Leveling up also comes with a degree of randomization, which can greatly diminish the effectiveness of your party. While randomized statistics are something the game borrows from RimWorld, RimWorld allows you to purposefully train skills and improve your character as you see fit, focusing on the strengths they started with or adjusting them to fit your needs. The fact that all progression in the game, outside of the gear you give your party members, is more or less random can mean that a level up is utterly inefficient because the game simply rolled the wrong stats or passive bonuses for you. A greater degree of control in this area would make leveling up feel like an impactful reward rather than just enough of a stroke of luck to manage.
The game also desperately needs to add the ability for your heroes to heal themselves automatically. A behavior that has them retreat from battle to use healing would be incredibly useful, especially in fast-paced fights where sometimes you can’t notice when a party member is dying before it is too late.
I’m not a big fan of the way that armor is essentially just a flat improvement to the health stat. There is no distinction between light, heavy, or medium armor, nor would there really be a reason to use any particular type because you just gain health from armor, meaning you always want to equip the armor with the best health stat. Simply adding to your HP total also makes it feel less like the armor is preventing damage and more like it’s just increasing the time it takes for you to be killed. Good, strong armor should make me use healing and healing items less. The entire armor system should probably be reworked and expanded upon with more sets and uses beyond just taking longer to die.
Overall, the game, despite its solid foundation, could use more: more weapons, more variety in builds, a better armor system, and an extended research tree. With two years of development ahead, I think Dungeon Settlers has plenty of room to improve, and I’m excited to see where it goes. In the meantime, the game is definitely worth checking out, as it still provides a fun and unique experience despite its flaws.
Pros:
- A unique setting that provides a fun and meaningful twist on Rimworld-style gameplay
- Great art, depicting a varied cast of high-fantasy characters for you to cherish (or watch die)
- A solid foundation for future updates
Cons:
- Current EA build feels light on content
- RNG in character progression can make an already difficult game harder unnecessarily
Try Hard Guides reviewed Dungeon Settlers on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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