Chris InglisDungeons of Sundaria is a third-person dungeon crawler with roguelike elements, developed and published by Industry Games. Originally released on Steam early access and consoles on June 7, 2022, version 1.0 released on December 13, 2023, and the game can be played solo or up to 4-player co-op. There is some surprising depth to the game and with three difficulty tiers for each dungeon, there’s plenty of options and damn is there a lot of loot.
Upon entering the game you are straight into character customisation. There are seven races to choose from, including human, dwarf and elf, to halfling, orc, gobbling and the lizard-like Drogal. Then there are five character classes to choose from including champion, cleric, ranger, rogue and wizard. I always go sword and board, so chose the dwarf champion and had a play with the customisation options.
Once in-game you are placed in an overworld view of a village where you can mouseover buildings where you see the blacksmith, guard house, Silver Dove Inn, ivory tower, and others. The game prompts you to start our adventures at the blacksmith and the guards house. Entering a building gives you a static view of the location and there will be some npcs you can interact with. There is some limited voice acting for the characters that say some scripted sentences, and you’re left to read the rest of the dialogue.
Eventually I was set off to enter a dungeon, defeat enemies and find some missing villagers. Again there is an overland screen showing several location you can visit. Each location has three difficulty tiers based on level requirements. This gives you goals to work towards to come back and try later for rarer loot drops. Each location is procedurally generated where you’ll need to defeat enemies, smash hidden walls to enter other rooms, completing quests, and collecting loot. The game features a loot system with different rarities of items, as well as multiple currency items used to purchase upgraded items back in town. There’s also crafting at the blacksmith and skill trees to specialise in.
The combat in Dungeons of Sundaria is action-oriented where you will need to dodge, roll, attack, and block/parry in real-time. The game is third-person however I feel the camera is a bit too close to the character that when you’re fighting multiple enemies, particularly with melee classes, your character takes up a lot of the battle view. I got used to it, but I would love it zoomed out just a touch more. As you level up you will unlock additional class skills, though as the mouse is locked to the gameplay you couldn’t mouse-over to see what they did. I just used trial and error, and most can be used easily, while others require certain weapons or certain conditions.
What surprised me was just how big some of these dungeons are. It took me about an hour and a half of solid gameplay to get through the first two dungeons, and an hour for the next one. In the first dungeon, I was worried that I would lose progress if I quit the game. There’s no save game function, rather you get checkpoints as you progress through the dungeon levels. After finally getting through the first dungeon, I realised you can leave dungeons partway through. When you go back to them, you are prompted whether you want to start a fresh run or spawn at your last checkpoint which I appreciated.
You pick up so much loot in this game! And a lot of it was not an upgrade to my current gear. It was very rare to find a piece that gave a small boost to what I was wearing. You can either sell the extra gear for coins or you can salvage it into fragments and other essences for crafting. You need a heck of a lot of fragments to get into crafting so I just ended up sticking to clearing dungeons and gaining levels to attempt harder dungeon difficulty levels for higher rarity items.
Overall, Dungeons of Sundaria is a solid dungeon crawler with some fun gameplay elements. Be warned, some of the dungeons are seriously long and took me 1.5 hours to clear. There are checkpoints and you can leave a dungeon to come back later. You pick up so much loot but it’s rare to find upgrades for your class, but you can sell or salvage everything in town. If you’re looking for a challenging and rewarding dungeon crawler, Dungeons of Sundaria is definitely worth checking out.
This review utilised a Steam key provided by Industry Games and Dungeons of Sundaria is available now on Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.
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