Developer: Dream Within Studios
Publisher: Dream Within Studios
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Endica VII: The Dream King – Preview
Today I shall take a closer look at Endica VII: The Dream King, a side scrolling action RPG made by Dream Within Studios. As anyone can try out their new playable demo (check out their site rocksclan.com if interested), I was curious to see how the current build fares.
When booting up the demo I immediately got welcomed with a sweet and calm song, like one of those tunes you heard as a child when going to sleep. This is a good start in regard of the title. Now, let’s take a look at the actual game shall we?
There aren’t many options in the main menu yet as you can only pick “New game”, “Continue” or choose whether to play with a controller or not. As there was no option to change the keyboard mapping, I opted for the controller which played a lot nicer than the standard key configuration. The placing of some of the buttons isn’t really intuitive and because of that, I saw myself failing to complete an area in a first run. It’s highly doubtful that the devs won’t feature custom keyboard mapping in The Dream King so I don’t think anyone should worry much about this.
If you ever plan to play The Dream King in its fullest glory and invite 3 friends over to play through the whole game in co-op, then it’s a must to have some controllers lying around. Sharing the keyboard with 3 others would be errr… problematic to say the least.
You can choose between 5 characters, each with their own fighting style and abilities. This means you’ll be able to at least find one that will work for you. Confronting enemies happens with either your primary or secondary weapon, whilst dashing can be used while attacking or in defense.
At this moment, there are a handful of different opponents, some will jump at you while others try to strike you with projectiles. Some things that bothered me a bit were the fact that those projectiles went through walls and floors as if they didn’t even exist and that some characters are obviously stronger and better than others. Some more balancing should help solve this issue.
Story wise, I had no clue what was going on. No backgrounds of the characters nor the main plot line are implemented yet so at this moment it’s just about trying not to fall in the abyss and slaying monsters. Therefore, I have no real commentary on this aspect of the game.
Visually, The Dream King features some nice environments with smooth transitions between them. I was pleasantly surprised about the variation put into the backgrounds as this is still a side-scroller with a pixilated look.
As for music, it’s a lot of the same constantly. Keep in mind that this is still a beta demo, so it’s likely that other songs are added in the mix later on and there’s currently only a small part of the game to be played.
This version is still in beta so of course not everything runs perfectly well. For example, the controls didn’t always respond correctly (especially when jumping over holes) and checkpoints could’ve been placed better.
At the moment, if you happen to die, you’ll have to replay a whole section again. It’ll often lead to frustration when you get to a really hard part.
Conclusion
The Dream King has potential and if the above described problems are handled, I’m confident that this title will please a lot of people. It’s old-school, challenging and comes with ‘co-op’ up to four players (however this will get very hectic I imagine). At this time, we’ll have to wait for the plotline to be presented or at least to give us a teaser about what’s going on, but in general, this game proves to be promising.
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