Dungeon Within

Dungeon Within Review: GameCoaster's Dungeon Maker Heir, Deep and Unfinished

Build the Kill Zone, Wake the Monsters, Let the Heroes Come

The formula is the studio's own from Dungeon Maker, remade: you are the Dark Lord, and the dungeon is a grid of combat rooms, sinister facilities and traps you arrange into a kill zone for waves of invading heroes; monsters awakened across the world fill the rooms, each with abilities and racial synergies, and when the invaders reach the core the Dark Lord's authority turns the fight. Runs are roguelike: relics hidden in the dungeon, bizarre events, choices that empower the next battle, and permanent progress through fragments of memory in an Ark of Memory that carries between runs. The reviews are a fan base in good standing: the most-voted Play review, a May 6 five-star with 43 votes, has paid GameCoaster three times in ten years and is content to pay for early access; a September 8 App Store five-star calls it a soft sequel to Dungeon Maker with monster girls returned; a July 10 five-star bought the expansion pass and praises developers who talk to their players.

Too Complex for Some, Too Long for Others, and a Patch That Broke the Farm

The objections come from inside the fan base and from outside it. Outside: a June 29 App Store two-star bought it for the ratings and found most of the price paid for the complexity of the systems rather than enjoyable play; a June 16 three-star was put off by the lack of a tutorial and the wall of information before finding it intuitive after a run or two. Inside: an August 25 four-star loves GameCoaster and finds the loop repetitive enough to fall asleep by the third and fourth boss fight; a September 2 Play five-star says the same — battle after battle once a build is going — and objects that enemies can run past an entire unit of eight monsters untouched. The sharpest is a September 18 one-star with the latest patch: high-tier units take heavy grinding, and after the update there is no reliable way to farm their parts without risking the destruction of a unit that took hours to obtain. It is still early access, which the May reviews accept and the June ones did not expect at $5.99.

$5.99 to Enter, Then Passes, Skins and Essences to $29.99 — No Ads

The price is $5.99 on both stores, and then the shop: an Underworld Expansion Pass at $5.99 and Underworld Pass 1 at $2.99, skins and packs from $1.99 to $17.99, and Essence of Transcendence and Ark of Eternity at $29.99 each, with Google Play's range at $2.09 to $28.99. There are no ads. Dungeon Maker sold DLC the same way over a decade. Google's data card lists financial info, app info and device IDs collected; Apple lists no tracking. The iOS build is 249 MB on iOS 15 or later, with iPad and Apple Silicon Macs; Android needs 7.1; five languages; rated Everyone 10+ and 13+. Five months in it shows 50,000-plus installs and 5,330 reviews at 4.7 on Play, 446 App Store ratings at 4.9. Prices are regional.