Dungeon Village
You’ve got a town and the aim is to make it a 5 star city. The interface looks like World Cruise Story… or it looks like you’re building a town in SimCity (so isometric grid, and building placement etc). In classic Kairosoft style, the goal isn’t achieved just by erecting buildings, and you have to involve the special adventurers who come to visit. The little people who walk around are very important – this isn’t just building structures like in SimCity. Without this clear distinction you’d actually think this game is absolutely awful!
As with all of these Kairo story games, there’s a kind of symbiotic loop between different actions and events. This one has a particularly confusing loop which we’ll briefly touch upon now: You have a star rating, and different star grades are achieved by meeting town/city criteria. Generally, the star requirements are linked to popularity, income, number of houses, quests, and events. Adventurers are indirectly linked to all of these factors. I shan’t go into more now as it really is quite involved!
To sum it up, there’s a method and flow which the player needs to feel out and understand. It’s not entirely obvious and that’s why this game is fantastic for those people who like solving intricate puzzles.
Regardless of how you play, developing an effective strategy will be largely a matter of trial and error, because Dungeon Village doesn't do a great job of explaining itself. It's not brain surgery and a very basic set of instructions is built into the game, but any detailed questions, like how to assign specific adventurers to a quest (as far as I can tell, you can't) or the differences between a Sparkee and a Maskoro (all the "monsters" in the game are distressingly cute, and polite, too), are likely to go unanswered.
But that's okay, because figuring it out is half the fun and Dungeon Village isn't the sort of game that will punish you for failing to grasp things right away. You're just as well off to jump in, put the pedal to the metal and flip back to the instructions if and when you need them. You probably won't; remember when I said I was going to check it out when I first started the game? I never did. I couldn't stop playing.
PS. Do yourself a favor and check out every other Kairasoft games.
Play Store
This post has been edited by phantomash: Apr 19 2012, 08:23 PM
ANDROID GAMES REVIEW THREAD (links @ 1st post), 9/11/2012 Total War, Spectral Souls