Thanks to Dolores Entertainment for the review code

Title: Bit Dungeon+
System: Xbox Series X
Price: $6.99
Release Date: 05/04/2017

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Story

In this action roguelike, you take control of a warrior who was thrown in a prison and must battle his way out.

That’s the entire plot. Do not be fooled by the release date, though. While I have a lot of queue games from years ago, none of them are as old as this game, and I just got it for the site not too long ago; it recently got a PS5 upgrade, and Xbox codes went out around the same time, but as you’ll see, well, about the Series X and this game…

Presentation

First things first, this is not a Series X game. I mean, I mark all my reviews as XSX as I play them all on Series X, but not all of them have upgrades. I normally don’t notice said upgrades outside of a higher resolution or smoother framerates, but I make note of this as the game did recently come to PS5, which was around the time I got code in for this version, so I was assuming it was updated for XSX around that time. However, this is still a base Xbox One game at the end of the day, from all the way back in 2017. Thus, if you remember that period of SFG history, you’ll know that back then there were a lot, a lot of pixel art indie top down games that I dealt with, during the period after Binding of Issac made waves and a lot of devs had to give their own spin on it.

Well, BitDungeon+ looks the part for one of these top down action roguelikes. You have a very NES-like pixel art style, which doesn’t look all that great and isn’t really that unique at all, and the game just loves to have blood in it for… reasons. It’s not like most of the enemies are grotesque or anything, they just bleed because they can, and so can your knight! It honestly comes off as a bit silly, but at least the backgrounds change up even on multiple playthroughs, even if you just go through Zelda-like rooms over and over again. There’s music here alright, but it might just be one of the most obnoxious sets of chiptune “inspired” songs I’ve ever heard in a video game. Just really annoying beats with nothing memorable about them save for the title theme, and even that I wouldn’t call “good”.

However the most baffling part of this game’s presentation, and one I found wasn’t even exclusive to this version, was how the game stutters briefly whenever you transition through a door. It’s a weird, janky scroll, and I had several moments where the stutter led me to walking right into an enemy near the entrance I came in from. This isn’t an Xbox One quirk they forgot to patch or fix, the PS5 version that just came out has this quirk too. It’d be one thing if this weird scrolling was just part of the game but it didn’t impact the gameplay, but considering how you are trying to stay alive across runs in this game, the transition is just ridiculous.

Gameplay

So, how’s the gameplay of BitDungeon+? Well, you and a friend can team up and venture throughout a floor consisting of multiple rooms, with the ultimate goal being to unlock a red door and fight a boss to move onto the next area. That being said, don’t just rush to the red door the minute you can; sometimes you’ll even spawn right beneath it. These bosses are very tanky, require a lot of hits to kill, and thus, it’s best to head around the floor and upgrade your equipment by defeating enemies. Pretty typical roguelike stuff.

You have a basic melee attack, a magic spell, and a shield for blocking projectiles. These can upgrade or change over the course of your run, too, and you can bring up a very helpful map and stats by pressing the B button. So off you go, clearing out all the enemies in a room, building up items and money and preparing yourself for an end boss!

…And that’s the loop of the game I got into before I had several things bounce me off it hard. For starters, the motions of getting new weapons and upgrading just… Wasn’t really all that fun? Your basic weaponry is rather weak, and the enemies are rather spongy. You beat them up, upgrade, do better for a bit, then either die because you get careless, or find harder enemies that are more spongy. Rinse and repeat. Every now and then you may come back to an old room and find the enemies you killed being feasted on, and defeating these new enemies can drop more helpful goodies than the typical grunts you see on the first go around. This particularly helps if you find enough currency this way to purchase items like a potion or upgrades via the shop.

Still, I found myself having multiple runs attempted on the easiest difficulty, going through to clear out the rooms just the best way I can, and even after upgrading good enough and reaching the boss, I found myself frustrated for the wrong reasons. I can enjoy a tough roguelike boss like in Xenon Valkyrie or Shiren, but these bosses are just sponges that shoot big attacks and don’t do much to be interesting. Sometimes they may summon small enemies to attack you. Sometimes they may just use big attacks that aren’t different from normal enemy attacks, except they’re big now. A lot of these bosses I found are rather uninspired and just big enemy group leader, so having them just be a waiting test of hoping their spongy health goes down before they poke you a few times and you die didn’t make me angry or rip my hair out. It bored me.

There are varying difficulty levels, and while I hoped trying the hardest one would give me a more satisfying gameplay loop, it just made things more boring and dull. There’s also a Tower of Babel mode that I found a lot more fun getting into at first, but it still ultimately suffers from the same problem of nothing having much of a satisfactory loop or oomph to it. Really the only thing that gives me a bit of hope for this game, is the local co-op, but sadly I was unable to test it during my review period. Still, having a friend to back me up would have made the spongier rooms a lot better.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Bit Dungeon+ was a game I bounced off so hard that I was gobsmacked by just how much of a negative magnet this game was to me. It has solid controls, but other than that you have the most generic presentation imaginable, enemy sponges that drag things out, and a roguelike structure that just isn’t fun or as well executed as many, many other games of this type. There’s seriously so, so many of these games out there, and as much as I enjoyed other games from this publisher in the past, I was a bit disappointed to find their roguelike didn’t check all the boxes.

Really the only reason to give Bit Dungeon+ a look, is the local co-op. This sort of thing is something a few of the bigger roguelikes do not offer, and I can see the game becoming way more fun with a friend helping you take care of enemies. But when the core gameplay loop, the literal core of a roguelike is done in such a haphazard way, and the Xbox Series X upgrade didn’t even seem to happen at all and there are still moments of jank to be seen, this really is a weak entry in the genre and pales compared to the dozen of similar indie roguelikes you could pick from.

I give Bit Dungeon+ a 4 out of 10.