Endless Dungeon review: roguelike, tower defense, and escort missions

It’s hard not to remember the escort missions that had us pulling our hair. Maybe the target was too slow, kept failing to defend themselves, or got stuck on the geometry and started running into walls (here’s looking at you, Max Payne 2,). There are exceptions to the rule — holding Yorda’s hand through IcoGet everyone in a room of safety Left for Dead 2, for example — but broadly, I’ve learned to dread the appearance of an escort mission, lest it spoil the luster of an otherwise brilliant game.

Endless DungeonIt’s a big escort. The ambitious hybrid of twin-stick, tower defense and roguelike sensibilities. Endless DungeonYou are shipwrecked on an isolated space station, in the middle a graveyard of stars. In order to reach the core of the planet and escape (with up to 2 other players in co-op or with two AI partners when playing alone), you must select a heroic character and guide your Crystal Bot to pockets of safety. You must build carefully placed turrets as waves of enemies appear intermittently while you are charting the floors. Maintaining the Crystal Bot’s health bar is paramount, as the crab-legged machine is the only means of opening up the exits that will take you deeper into the station’s treacherous numbles. If it goes boom, you’re going back to the saloon, which acts as a HadesHub between runs, where you can chat and purchase upgrades using your earnings.

The Crystal Bot has all the hallmarks of an annoying escort — it’s painfully slow and extremely vulnerable (less so with mid-game upgrades) — but Endless DungeonThe process of protecting it becomes cerebral. A rewarding feedback loop is achieved by obscuring the mucky optics of an escort mission in an onion’s worth of layered systems. We’ll start by talking about doors. Predominantly, action-focused games like to put you on the front foot, so you don’t think much about the strategic implications of opening a door. It’s just a bunch of polygons between you and the next group of enemies. In the meantime, you can still play. Endless Dungeon, opening doors becomes a chin-stroking consideration — and, eventually, an art form.

Image: Amplitude Studios/Sega

Three resources will determine your runs: science, food and industry. At contextual terminals, good allows you to upgrade your hero’s skills, science allows you to research more turrets, and industry is debited when you build a turret. These resources are earned by opening the doors you need to reach the exit. This, in turn, will determine the level of difficulty your Crystal Bot must follow. And that’s without considering any diversions, such as tempting upgrade crystals or anti-turret “dark rooms.” When I first started playing, I was bullish, my roguelike muscle memory telling me to open every door as it gave me more scratch to play with. But when I began defending my bot at the floor’s exit, I was besieged from every angle, and my run was quickly undone.

A door can lead you to a chest, a vendor, or an important upgrade terminal — but it can also lead you to a monster spawner, and you can’t undo that. Pick the wrong doors to open, and you’ll end up with a cul-de-sac with a spawn room at the end, a useless track for hordes to charge through. A back door flanking your tower defense killbox will make your coworkers sigh. But pick the right set of doors, and you’ll feel like a genius, your enemies funneled into a never-ending turret trap of critical-hit chaos. When you pull the handle, it creates an atmosphere that is reminiscent of Resident Evil. Endless Dungeon.

The generator slots scattered around the floor act as an evil counterbalance for this system. Build one, and it’ll buff the chosen resource intake when opening doors. But in turn, you’ve created a dangerous geographical commitment — enemies will target generators in addition to the Crystal Bot, so you’ll have to defend them if you want to be flush with currency. Endless Dungeon’s psychological game design tango is mind-boggling but well executed, demanding plenty of multiplayer communication.

Image: Amplitude Studios/Sega

You must also consider the weaknesses and strengths of your enemies. Others are hidden and need specialized turrets to reveal them, while some slow you down and force you to get behind the skull of their protector to do damage. You can easily get into a position where you haven’t researched enough turrets to deal with multiple enemy types and are only saved by your guile, which leads to some compelling player-led stories of survival.

Amplitude Studios’ eye for detail extends onto Endless Dungeon’s “hero shooter” protagonists. Each character has a range of abilities, including a passive ability, an active one, and a final ultimate. There are also two guns with a point-and shot, as well as a powerful shove. Fassie is a mustachioed mixologist with a unique “spiciness” stat that determines the benefit of the buffs they throw at allies. Bunker, my personal favorite, is a shield-toting Scottish robot that can block doorways with an invulnerability-inducing ultimate. The interplay is much more enjoyable in co-op runs than solo, when managing your friends can be a difficult task.

The heroes are all punters at the aforementioned saloon, and you gradually convince them to join your escapades by exploring the districts that precede the station’s core. Endless DungeonThe same tricks can be used to The Risk of Rain 2. with its metagame, asking you to complete narrative-adjacent missions mid-run to open up upgrade slots and enliven hero backstories, even if they aren’t all that interesting.

Image: Amplitude Studios/Sega

Although the character designs vary, they are always suave. The intricate animations that serve as a cyberpunk Hellboy look better when in motion rather than on menus and animatics. I particularly enjoyed the halftone effect my fiery pistols would pump out as I repelled waves of sticky spiders in the station’s same-y corridors. Thankfully, Endless Dungeon’s procedural districts offer some welcome perspective vistas to break up the monotonous carbon, with exposed metal flooring giving way to lush biomes and waterfalls just out of reach.

Many clever ideas are present, including the use of a kinetic method to heal and upgrade turrets. Team Fortress 2,’s Engineer or Overwatch 2’s Torbjörn. It’s a good thing. Endless Dungeon remixes the roguelike boss battle, too, with “Bug Momma” only appearing in tandem with randomly occurring enemy waves, forcing you into an aggressive ebb and flow to topple it. The problem is that once you’ve figured out how to beat a boss, there’s not much fun to be had in repeating it, and this is something of an existential problem for Endless Dungeon: It just doesn’t feel all that endless at present.

Image: Amplitude Studios/Sega

There are many runs and there is a lot of criteria laxity, which affects the pace at which roguelikes progress. It’s easy to bank districts and heroes, equip your favourite character quickly and grab the trivial permanent saloon upgrades. There’s no big skill tree to dig into later down the line, and the weapon and chip slot upgrades aren’t meaningful enough to make varied builds.

As good as dungeoneering can be, it becomes boring once side quests are no longer interesting. If you’re not in it for the lore-based collectibles or handful of cosmetics, it’s difficult to convince yourself to keep going. You can make your runs harder with difficulty-enhancing beverages that produce palpable debuffs, but this doesn’t address the issue entirely.

This is the real reason for the escort mission’s reputation to be rehabilitated. Endless DungeoIt’s far from being the best roguelike. It seems that by tactfully combining so many genres it has forgotten the importance of capturing your attention over time.

Endless DungeonReleased on October 19 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. Xbox One and Xbox Series X were also available. Sega provided a PS5 pre-release code for the game’s review. Vox Media maintains affiliate partnerships. Vox Media can earn affiliate commissions, but this does not affect editorial content. This is where you can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.