I have to admit, I was surprised by Dungeons of Sundaria. I was expecting a janky game in the style of Dungeons & Dragons : Dark Alliance, but what I got was something weirdly unique and addicting. It's a dungeon crawler that can be played either solo or co-op. At the start of the game you create your character, choose a race and class (Cleric, Champion, Mage, Ranger or Rogue) and you're immediately thrown into a town with a small tutorial on what all the NPCs do. You've got your basics like a potion seller, blacksmith, innkeeper etc. and some less basic NPCs like a trainer where you upgrade your skills that reminded me of old World of Warcraft trainers.

After a short tutorial, you are thrown into the first dungeon, and oh boy, I wasn't prepared for the experience. The dungeons in this game are hand crafted, so nothing is randomly generated, and they are HUGE. While it took me around 2 hours to finish ONE dungeon, a friend of mine was playing it for 4 hours because he was breaking every barrel and crate on the map for extra loot. It's this whole adventure where you start by fighting bandits, then while you're deeper in you're fighting zombies, all of a sudden you're in this huge library fighting vampires which all culminate in an amazing-looking boss fight at the end of the dungeon. While in the first dungeon alone I saw more enemy variety than most AAA games have, and that was just the first dungeon.

This level of quality goes on through all the eight dungeons the game has, and they very rarely reuse enemies from previous dungeons. So you can really see that the developers really enjoyed working on this and that it's their passion project. The level design is insane in some areas, and the boss's ideas just keep on coming. Some of the bosses that really stuck to me were headless assassins who keep following you through a maze and can't be killed until you find his head. This huge dragon appears at the start of the dungeon flying overhead and then you find him later in said dungeon for an amazing fight where you've really got to be careful of your positioning and many more. Every dungeon has around 10 bosses and a lot more optional ones that could be hiding either in breakable walls, hidden switches or optional paths.

The gameplay loop of going into a dungeon, collecting loot, going back to town, salvaging/selling the loot and crafting better gear is really addicting and, while it took me around 9 hours to complete all the dungeons, I'm not done with the game yet because every dungeon has three difficulties - normal, hard and nightmare and the endgame kind of works like a Diablo 3 paragon system, where after you get to max level (20) every time you gain enough experience you can use it for a certain stat boost of your choice ( health, damage, critical chance etc.) and also, I only played one class, and based on what I saw from other people playing, every class feels unique and is a different experience.

It might seem that I'm giving this game all pros and no cons, but to be honest, there is some jank here that I really hope gets fixed. For example, I was having some de-sync issues while I was playing single-player, which really shouldn't be happening, some boss attacks were wrongly displayed, which meant even if I was standing in a safe spot, I still got one shot, and some bugs here and there, but never anything game breaking.

I really hope that the devs continue to update this game and expand the universe. Maybe add some more replayability with a mode like boss rush or something endgame to work towards. If you're looking for a fun, hack-and-slash RPG that you can just turn your brain off and play, I highly recommend Dungeons of Sundaria, there really is nothing like it currently on the market.

8.5/10