Developer: Gamebreaking Studios, Angelos Mako
Publisher: Gamebreaking Studios
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Dungeon Rampage – Preview
As the gaming industry moves slowly but surely towards a digital-only model, game preservation becomes more and more important. As servers go offline, games go down with them, ending up on the Lost Media Wiki. Admittedly, not every game that is lost to time is a classic -in fact, the vast majority are obscure and simple titles- but that doesn’t mean that we should sit idly by. For this reason alone, Dungeon Rampage is worth checking out. Originally a browser game that was playable on Facebook between 2012 and 2017, Dungeon Rampage received a very unlikely second lease on life. How did this happen, and how does the game hold up after all this time?
We can’t talk about Dungeon Rampage’s revival without first diving into the fan-led recovery project that drove it. When the original game’s servers went offline, Dungeon Rampage effectively vanished overnight, ending years of chaotic co-op dungeon crawling on Facebook. Years later, Angelos Mako took it upon himself to bring Dungeon Rampage back. Rather than creating a spiritual successor, he went the distance, tracking down the original creators, securing the IP, and even recovering the original source code from an old laptop. A Kickstarter campaign provided not only the financial backing needed to fund the revival, but also proved that there was a community eager to return to the dungeons.
We never played the original Dungeon Rampage ourselves, but it’s easy to see the appeal when you actually get to grips with the game. Being a mid-2010s browser game, simplicity and accessibility are the keywords here. At its core, Dungeon Rampage is a fast-paced, arcade-style hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. The game was designed to be played in short bursts, either solo or with up to three other players. After picking your hero, you dive straight into compact dungeons filled with waves of enemies, traps, and of course, lots of loot. Combat is quick and readable, letting you chain attacks, trigger special abilities, and even go into a temporary rage mode. After a run, you decide which loot you keep or sell, level up your chosen warrior, and unlock new heroes, pets, and cosmetics using gems. As you’d expect, the gameplay loop is kept intentionally simple, and replay-focused: clear a dungeon, get rewards, grow (slightly) stronger, and jump back in for another run, without long setup or heavy story distractions.
Even without having played the original, Dungeon Rampage definitely comes across as a game that feels authentic. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that it was explicitly built starting from the original source code. For the most part, this approach works to the game’s benefit, but sometimes to its detriment as well. The original Dungeon Rampage was a freemium title, relying on microtransactions. The revival has abandoned this, instead opting for a single purchase. This is undeniably a positive and consumer-friendly move, but the game’s pacing hasn’t hit the right pace just yet: you’ll accrue chests faster than you can reasonably open, and hero unlocks are extremely slow. A rebalancing is definitely required here.
Another area that requires some more polish, in our opinion, is going to be more controversial. As much as we like Dungeon Rampage’s hand-drawn cartoon aesthetic, the game’s insistence on using the graphics of the original really works against it. Not only could the resolution use a bump, but artefacting and interlacing are common in the game’s few cutscenes. It’s the classic argument of preservation versus modernisation, of course. A good mid-way solution would be a toggle between the original and updated graphics. This definitely isn’t Dungeon Rampage’s biggest issue, at least not from a technical or gameplay perspective, but it is the most prominent, given that you’re constantly looking at the game while you’re playing.
Given the community-driven nature of Dungeon Rampage’s revival, it’s worth noting that the development team is actively listening to player feedback, even more so than many other Early Access titles we’ve played. We’ve encountered some technical quirks, like traps having larger hitboxes than they should, and keyboard prompts shown on-screen while playing with a controller, but these are reportedly already being dealt with behind the scenes. Dungeon Rampage is far from finished, but looking at how swiftly and actively the team responds fills us with hope that the final product will exceed even the most critical fans’ expectations.
Looking forward, the four playable heroes currently in the game will soon be joined by four additional ones, as well as a mode called the ‘Ultimate Rampage Roguelite Challenge’. How the team will prioritise this does depend on player feedback, with systems and content still in flux. We weren’t able to try out Dungeon Rampage’s multiplayer co-op mode just yet, but from what we understand, matchmaking is still uneven, particularly when low-level players (that’s us) would be matched with much higher-level ones. Part of this is of course because the player base is still fairly small, but it is steadily growing. Whether or not server stability, matchmaking smoothness, and anti-cheat measures will be able to keep up remains to be seen.
Conclusion
We’ll be the first ones to admit that the story behind Dungeon Rampage’s revival earned the game more sympathy than its gameplay deserved. While the core loop definitely has appeal, the current build does very little to hide some of the flaws of the original’s freemium model. Still, with a dedicated development team and a passionate fan community behind it, we have little doubt that Dungeon Rampage’s final version is going to defy expectations. And who knows, maybe this presumed dead dungeon crawler may just become the de facto standard bearer for bringing back browser games from beyond the grave.
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