Bit Dungeon+ is a procedurally-generated, dungeon crawling, roguelike that recently released on Xbox One. In the game, I played as a warrior tasked with slaying hundreds of unique monsters in order to collect gold and rescue lost friends. The hack-and-slash system is reminiscent of old-school dungeon crawlers like Zelda. But did the developers take the extra steps to expand upon what the classics have already done?
Bit Dungeon+ is named for its main two components: the art style and the dungeon crawling. The art style is just like the 8-bit Nintendo games from the 1980s. While this art direction has been in style for the last couple of years, that doesn’t mean it is a great design choice. The games who do bit-graphics right, life Shovel Knight and The Binding of Isaac, put a lot of effort in bringing the world to life within the chosen art style.
Bit Dungeon+ is void of these bits of flair. For example, most of the characters are all monochromatic. They do not have shading or shadows. The lighting effects are incredibly small or non-existent. The monsters are carbon copies of each other and move without any sort of character qualities. Basically, the enemies are completely void of life and meaning.
I will have to give some credit to whichever designer decided to make my character’s appearance change when I collected new items. A new helmet actually changed my character to show the new helmet. Same with armor and weapons. These little touches were fantastic, I just wish that level of detail was put into the world as well.
The second component of the name, Dungeon, is a highlight of this game. The dungeons are procedurally generated and vary in difficulty and enemy types between floors. At the beginning of each run I started on a random first floor. I then battled the enemies of each room to collect a key and progress into the next room. When backtracking, weird demon rat creatures were devouring the remains of my previous victims. These demons allowed me to collect money and health by murdering them.
For the most part, this was engaging and methodical. I killed enemies in new rooms, fought my way back through the demons, and eventually ended up at a boss battle. This is where the first gameplay imbalance was noticed. Throughout the entire floor, I had taken a ton of damage but it never slowed me down. My character was basically a bullet sponge. This is a good thing because the combat downright sucked, but more on that later.
So after taking so much damage, and never having any issues with a room, I got to a boss that I defeated before it even moved. My character was all powerful and I was the destroyer of worlds—until the fifth floor. As soon as I started that floor, I was so underpowered that it took me ten or more hits to defeat an enemy, something I did in only one other floor before. I was killed in the second room of that floor, ending my game.
I then booted up another game and tried again, and the exact same thing happened. There are power-ups throughout the game that can be received. One is for health, one is for damage, and one is for critical hits chance. The “crit” chance one is basically worthless so I stuck with the first two. In the first game, I chose different power-ups each time to see if I noticed a difference. In the second game I chose only damage to prepare for the fight ahead and I still lost on the same floor.
The third time I did all health and died on the second floor because I could not get enough damage done to clear a room in time. The balance was completely off and really turned me away from wanting to play more runs as I felt intense luck in getting the right item set is really what is needed to win.
The combat is downright atrocious. Bit Dungeon+ has some of the worst combat in any game I can remember playing. Basically, I mashed X the entire time. I could hold X to make a “super” attack that wasted a ton of time and ended up getting me hit way more than I hit the enemy. The block button pulled up my shield that had its own health bar and saved me from ranged attacks. When that health bar ran out I was stunned in place.
The issue is that on any given room, there could be seven “baddies” shooting ranged and seven melee guys, all eager to eat my face. The directional controls were incredibly clunky making the D-pad the only option for movement. I could not dodge attacks, I had to block or power through. If I blocked, I did not have enough time to start attacking before another barrage came in—meaning I took damage. If I just went in, all fourteen guys hit me—meaning I took damage, again. There was never a time that I wasn’t taking damage.
Why was the damage so unimportant in the earlier floors, then incredibly important on floor five? The game lacks an ability to dodge and counter the attacks of enemies. Instead it forced me to always brute-force the levels, and rewarded me by allowing me to progress. If I wasn’t supposed to play like that, why was that behavior rewarded? What was I doing wrong?
My final gripe is about the music. In a roguelike game, the player has to revisit the same levels over and over again. The music has to be varied and catchy. Of course, in Bit Dungeon+, the music was lackluster and underwhelming. During my first playthrough, I shut the music off and started listening to a podcast. That is never a good sign for a game meant to be played hundreds of times. More care needed to be placed there.
Summary
Bit Dungeon+ is not very fun. I really didn’t enjoy my time with it even though this game belongs to my favorite genre. I spent ten hours in Bit Dungeon+ and I will say that is enough. The game did not give me any internal or external motivation to replay it. The difficulty spike, clunky controls, underwhelming music, and disappointing artwork lead to a game that is much weaker than it should be.
Joshua was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 42 articles across game reviews, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.