Dungeon Mana Steam Charts & Stats

I think the concept here is pretty interesting; random abilities chosen at character creation which are triggered off a shared resource system; add in fatigue so you can't just spam one character over and over, and it seems like there's some real legs behind the game here. Unfortunately, there are a laundry list of pretty glaring issues. Let's start with the problems we solved 40 years ago: unskippable slow slow typing cutscenes at the start of runs. This is a roguelike; trying again is expected, so what the actual hell? absolute basic quality of life. When leveling up, you are helpfully told the ability will go to a character with whatever name and their picture. You can then go into the "team" screen to see what abilities your team already has. A team screen that doesn't have either the name or the picture for some reason??? At least the picture is 1:1 with a class, but if you have two of the same class, which is common in the early game, good luck knowing which character gets the upgrade. The only time you can tell what name a character has is in combat by the floating text above them, so you apparently are expected to memorize these random strings. awful. Even with low QOL, maybe, maybe. But the actual abilities are underwhelming or, in too many cases, disasterously bad. Most are just "do some damage to 1-2 random targets", which is serviceable if boring The warlock has a heal which.. gives their health TO A RANDOM TEAMMATE which means half the time they're not even healing who they need to heal, and sacrificing their own health to do it. Or a debuff removal on the same class when debuffs are actually pretty rare? You only get 3 abilities, and randomly assigned to specific mana types, so having an ability that doesn't do anything filling an entire slot feels awful, especially because you will regularly get 2-3 copies of the same random ability. With the exception of self-targets, there isn't any target selection in the game, making many abilities feel very bad to use. But perhaps the most aggregiously badly designed starting character class is the samurai. Boring basic attack or self heal, except a suicide attack. You don't have any real means of rezzing (maybe after you've beaten enough runs to get items, but I still hadn't after 1.5 hours), so you've basically got a random chance of having one of your characters out the entire run if you activate that ability. EXCEPT that a common mechanic is to automatically activate a random ally ability. So you will redo some of the early game (slow, slow typing cutscene intro and all) because sometimes you are offered 2 samurai who both have a suicide action, and even if you never activate it, they'll likely die in the first fight or two. Ultimately, while you get 3 abilities per character, the perk design makes you lean very heavily into one "main" ability per character, which really reduces any kind of strategy. See, a fairly common perk is for using mana of a specific color can sometimes produce more random mana. So even with all these pretty glaring issues, with no targeting, and no real value in casting all but one color per character, each run ends up just a boring dance of playing the right color on the right character without doubling up. It doesn't really matter what you're fighting (except maybe to use purify once in a blue moon) or what environmental effects are happening; you just throw mana at your team to hit the right color per character without doubling up and that's.. kinda it. So on top of all the amateur design, it just doesn't really have much complexity at all once you get into the actual meat of the gameplay. MAYBE if this was early access. And a third the price. The concept is a neat enough starting point, but the execution is missing the mark in too many different places. As it stands, thumbs down.