REVIEW : Legend of Keepers (PC)
With Legend of Keepers, the French from Goblinz Studio offer an original experience by diverting the codes of the dungeon crawler. Now it’s up to the player to protect a dungeon against heroes who are a little too curious. Halfway between Dungeon Keeper and Darkest Dungeon, it is therefore with this singular, and above all funny, proposal that Legend of Keepers is trying to make a name for itself in the ultra-competitive universe of Roguelite.
Run a dungeon full of monsters like a normal business. From this quirky idea, Goblinz Studio decided to make it the starting point for its new game, Legend of Keepers, finally available after a year of early access. Like other titles from the studio, it is a mix between Roguelite and Dungeon Crawler, but with a certain originality. While Dungeon Rushers, one of the first games from the developers released in 2016, made it possible to visit dungeons with a team of heroes, Legend of Keepers takes the exact opposite of this proposition.
As if these games were two sides of the same coin, Legend of Keepers conversely places us in the shoes of monsters. This time, the player takes on the role of the master of a dungeon who must protect a treasure and prevent heroes from seizing it. The parties then take the form of a series of weeks during which you must manage your dungeon between two adventurer expeditions. Recruit new monsters, improve traps, organize looting, boost the morale of his troops … Each week offers random events from which the player must choose. Once a certain number of turns have passed, heroes will come to visit you to steal your treasure. This is when the game reveals all its complexity.
A CATCHY AND FUNNY GAME PRINCIPLE …
Before the latter begin their exploration, you must prepare the ground to make the progress of the looters as difficult as possible. To do this, the player must distribute his units and traps across the different rooms of the dungeon. Once the preparation is complete, the adventurers begin their exploration. If they make it to your units, turn-based combat is triggered. Each of your units has one or more skills and you have to play on the weaknesses of your opponents to hope to win. The combat system is very similar to that of the Darkest Dungeon that the developers themselves cite as a reference. To get rid of these intruders, two ways are available to the player: eliminate them or scare them away. Indeed, in addition to life points, the heroes have a morale gauge which can decrease thanks to certain skills. Once at zero, they take flight. When faced with physically resistant enemies, this is a good alternative.
However, if the explorers manage to defeat your monsters and thwart your traps, they will arrive in the treasure room, facing your dungeon master. If the latter is defeated, the game ends. Conversely, details that a game is won after beating the last group of heroes who appear on average after forty weeks, or 30 minutes of play. Whether it is a victory or a defeat, your dungeon master gains experience at the end of a game. With each new level, the latter recovers point that he can distribute in a skill tree to become more powerful. Thus, as in all Roguelite, death does not represent a fatality in itself. You are then free to relaunch a game with the same character or another since the game has three dungeon masters at the moment. Each of them has their skills and can recruit different types of units depending on the game.
As for the form, we must salute the work of the developers which gives a real identity to the title. During the expeditions, we note that the pixel art of the dungeon environments and the monster sprites are particularly neat, which makes the gaming experience all the more pleasant. The title’s other great strength lies in its humorous tone that applies modern business terms to a fantasy world filled with goblins and demons. To avoid this and boost the morale of the troops, you simply have to seek help from a psychologist or do … team building. Finally, in terms of the visual part, we can blame the title for the presence of some rare typos, but especially the design of its interface which is less pleasing to the eye than the rest of the game’s graphics.
… UNFORTUNATELY TOO REPETITIVE
In terms of progression, each master must complete five games with different rules before gaining access to Infinity and Ascension modes. As its name suggests, the first allows you to play without stopping until Game Over, while the second offers games with increasingly complicated constraints. As long as you stick to its principle, Legend of Keepers offers enough content to hold you back for a while, without reaching a titanic lifespan.
REVIEW : Rising Hell (XBOX Series X)
