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Dungeon Princess: Infinity | Review
Dungeon Princess: Infinity is an RPG that has some items that can drop as “NFTs” that can be sold for EOS. It is a mobile game where you control a group of five heroes and battle it out through waves of monsters in dungeons. There is a vast selection of gear, skill points, and skills to train for your heroes. While there is auto-combat for using in the lower dungeons that will only last you so long.
Storyline
Love, jealousy, and a group of gamers with an end goal of being number one in the Dungeon Princess game you take the role of leading these characters to victory. The game itself is named after the goal the group of characters you end up playing has. This is being the first group to have a female slay the games end boss.
Every once in a while in this game you will get a short cutscène where the characters are talking among themselves. Sometimes they are talking about their daily lives and who has a crush on someone within the party. Other times they are talking about beating the game itself. Along with many other moments that add a little personal touch to this game.
You don’t usually see this kind of thing in a blockchain game. It was nice to see some banter and a short storyline so far to the game from what I’ve played. I won’t spoil too much more than that. If you are someone who prefers to skip over these kinds of things you don’t have to worry about missing critical information for the most part. As I‘ve found anything they have explained would have been simple to work out on my own.
Characters, Items, And Skills
This to be is where Dungeon Princess: Infinity is amazing. There are a bunch of characters to make a group around. Along with quite a huge array of weapons and armor, you need to farm to progress forward. You also have stats and can level up skills as well.
As you play throughout this game once in a while you have a new member join your roaster. At the start of the game, you get a couple rather quickly that end up sticking with for quite some time that you build up. In total there are twelve characters each with their own unique abilities and skillsets they bring to a group.
Finding the perfect match for later on in the game and trying to manage twelve characters, gear, stats, and skills can get a bit complicated. I’m glad it is saved gold bars I was getting for playing this game to buy more inventory space as that is going be needed as you work out the best gear upgrade path for each character.
All items themselves are part of different groups, rarity, and have random stats rolled on them as well. Sometimes you might end up with a plus to a certain character skill. Other times you get a flat amount of stat points from what the item rolls. The most important thing so far has been working out how you want to mix and match different sets to get desirable set effects. These tend to be quite the game-changer if you can get all of an item set to drop.
When you get a bunch of items you don’t want or need to make some inventory space you scrap them for enchanting material. These can also be earned from running dungeons. How far an item can be enchanted depends on the roll of up to 20 enchants you end up landing on the time. Items can be increased further beyond the limited roll with gold bars. Once you get past ten they start to cost a lot of material and can even fail. These enchantments themselves increase the damage of weapons and defense on gear.
When you run dungeons a successful competition grants you two skill books or more if you are running them on a harder difficulty setting. Each character has their own special skill book that is needed with increasing costs of books the higher a skill gets. My Moon’s Grace for instance at level 20 will cost 7 Knight Books.
Among the many different skills each character has. They also tend to have a group buff that lasts for a short period of time during combat. These can provide quite the advantage. They also are not something if you leave auto-combat on tend to casts themselves. As they focus more on healing and attacking. Along with using single target buffs. This seems to be how the game finds a balance between allowing players to auto dungeon runs and needing to manually play during the harder encounters.
Overall there is a lot of planning and thought the player needs to put into when dealing with this part of the game. While you can run dungeon for more skill books and items if needed. Your goal is to as quickly as possible reach the highest dungeon you can for better gear. So not taking advantage of set effects and leveling up critical skills can slow down game progression.
Running Dungeons
The bread and butter of Dungeon Princess: Infinity is running dungeons. There are two ways the player can run them in full auto or semi-manually as they select skills while toggling auto on for basic attacking to save time. The game starts you off easy and then really ramps up the difficulty settings.
At first, I thought this game was going to be way too easy. In the first few stages of dungeons, I hardly had to stop to swap out gear and I never bothered enchanting anything either. Most times I was not even worrying about set effects either. Outside of dealing with some bosses, I was slaying it.
After a couple of stages, the game had a bit of a bump in difficulty. I went from fully being able to clear things to have to take advantage of how these first stages of dungeons work. As long as you beat 50% or in this case the first twenty-five levels in a dungeon you can advantage to the next one. Where you then could get better gear. Which you can use to go back and clear to fifty for the higher rolled items.
Around mid-stage on this first map is when things started to really slow down. I thought at that point this game would not get more difficult than that. I even had been just auto running the dungeons which did take away from how I felt about the game. I was also getting so many keys at the time it seemed to be a waste of not using this in-game feature.
That, however, came to a screeching halt once I made it past stage Z. Where I get crushed and realize you need to do a lot of farming in some lower stages. This is also where you unlock for the second half the game with the ability to have two teams. Along with getting more characters that have amazing skills but are not quite on par with gear, skills or level as your other characters yet.
You might also notice these other sets of dungeons have much higher levels to them. That has a massive effect on item stat rolls. You also can no longer leapfrog ahead by clearing just 50% as these as they require 100% clear. This includes whatever nasty boss that can be found at the end of them. I have yet to get any red drop rarity items from them which I was hoping I would like to help move forward.
As far as combat goes your character regenerate action points over time. Each attack has not only a cost but limitations on what position in the group they can be used from. For melee attacks, for instance, they send that character to the front line to take the bulk of the damage before they are able to land their own attacks. While someone like a range class will never leave the backline and not worry as much about taking damage.
Understanding the different skills and using them at the right moments like in any other game wins battles. There are some nasty monsters that can and will one-shot a character if they can’t take the damage and need to be moved out of the way. While other monsters may cast entire group heals that require you to burst them down with all the damage you have.
I do wonder just how far the furthest player has made it. I have a feeling nowhere near beating the game and seeing the best loot either. That could provide quite a lucrative opportunity for those who are quite far in if this game takes off selling gear to players who are struggling to progress forward in the dungeon.
What Makes This A Blockchain Game?
This is one of those games where it’s hard to say if it’s a true blockchain game or not. While some items can be sold for EOS you don’t need an account to just play. You only need an EOS account to list items for sale. This is done entirely through their own website or what appears to be since there no other games listed on that exchange.
With my own EOS wallet still over max CPU I myself could not test this feature. There are however quite a number of listing. Some of the higher-end items are being listed for 3 EOS or even higher I’m just not sure if people are paying those kinds of prices. The end game items for this game the players themselves do not seem to have reached just yet.
The only thing that makes this game a possible blockchain game is these items you can trade that they are calling NFT which stands for. The majority of item drops you get however are not player tradeable. I am going to assume they have like other games chosen to switch on and off via trading the blockchain state of items that can be an NFT (aka destroying the items and reissuing another if the NFT state is needed for trading. It’s a bit more technical this but good enough for this review). This is a trend more blockchains are using to reduce resources being used for transactions on them.
It’s hard to say if they are just using NFT as a marketing stunt or if they have further plans to unitize blockchains. Since players are selling items for EOS it was at least nice not having to sign every transaction and use CPU for the time being. As such I can understand some not considering this as a blockchain game while others will since you can sell.
Microtransaction
Buying in-game items are entirely thought the google play store. If there were options to pay with cryptocurrency for gold I did not notice any while I was playing this game. There are also some items in the store that are not worth buying unless you are some kind of whale that plays 24/7.
You would think their business model would be selling dungeon keys where they give the player a couple a free keys a day to run some dungeons and would be it. I myself wasted my first 100 gold bars buying one hundred dungeon keys thinking that would be how it be. Later on, I noticed when I was under thirty keys I would gain one every five minutes till I hit thirty again. This if you take one to three minutes to run dungeon you are more or less set on acquiring almost more keys then you could use.
They are selling some cosmetic items for your characters as skins. I rather like seeing this as a buyable option from the game developers. It has no real impact on the game and allows them to make some money.
Since you can buy items off a player market for EOS from other players I’m not that concerned that they are also selling item chests that you can open. These kinds of games are treated a bit differently with it being considering a blockchain game as far as my stance when it comes to just being able to buy loot boxes. Granted I’m not a fan of loot boxes so I won’t be opening many myself outside of free gold bars I get.
The most important use to spend gold bars was buying more inventory space. For fifty gold a pop you can unlock up to four inventory tabs. This is great when you are running lower dungeons that you can do so on auto and don’t have to worry about bags filling up.
The other major use for gold bars is just spending one to reset an entire dungeon level. That gives you the opportunity to run lower levels if you were unable to reach the max level yet. Which is something I did a few times when I got stuck for a few hours before getting needed gear upgrades.
Overall I have mixed feelings regarding this part of the game. I will say they were quite generous with giving you the ability to earn gold bars a couple of times a week. This allowed me to buy what I wanted without having to spend any money out of pocket to play this game.
Final Thoughts
It is nice to see this game is more than just click on the auto button and let the game run all day in the background. While there was quite a lot of that which I was not the biggest fan of. There were also moments of needing to manually play to push forward with hopes of acquiring better gear.
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Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from the game Dungeon Princess: Infinity.
