Guild of Dungeoneering Ultimate Edition review for Nintendo Switch, PC

I have a real love-hate relationship going on with Guild of Dungeoneering.

On the one hand, I can?t stop playing it. It?s got a great premise: it?s a deck-based dungeon-crawler where you create the world around you, laying down your paths, your treasure, and your enemies. The game gives you objectives (i.e. reach the end of the dungeon, kill X number of monsters, battle this boss after X turns), but it?s mostly up to you how you achieve them. Every time one of my characters dies ? which happens quite a bit ? I immediately launch my next explorer on their quest, hoping that will be the one who can get me a little bit further.

On top of that, Guild of Dungeoneering looks pretty neat. Its art style is best described as ?doodling?, with everything looking hand-drawn, and the background looking like graph paper to add to the verisimilitude,

At the same time, though, there are things about it I absolutely loathe. For starters, your explorers are all weak and stupid. They start off every level with barely any health, and even though you can slowly build them up over the course of a dungeon, if they?re still alive for your next runthrough, they generally seem to start off just as weak.

Furthermore, they have a tendency to walk into lethal situations. Even if you lay out a path for them that helps them build up their stats, it was distressingly common for them to ignore that completely and instead run headlong into a situation where they were wildly overpowered. Since you have no control over what they do beyond the promise of rewards in one direction or another, it can make for some very frustrating ? and very short ? run-throughs.

But again, I couldn?t stop playing it, frustrating flaws notwithstanding. I don?t know whether that says more about me or about Guild of Dungeoneering?s design, but I can definitely say that it makes for a very addictive experience ? albeit one you may hate and love in equal parts.

Gambrinous provided us with a Guild of Dungeoneering Ultimate Edition Switch code for review purposes.