Estimated reading time: 7.5 minutes
Welcome one and all to the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk! A terrifying dungeon renowned throughout the land! Or at least it would be if the dungeon master hadn't let it get run down. Thankfully you're here to fix things by...running a tavern and hiring minions?
Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master is an interesting title that, despite what you may assume, is more about being a dungeon manager than a master. Yeah, you can place traps and fight off adventurers, but it's actually a very small part of your dungeon economy. Your task in NDM is to successfully earn more money than you're spending and to raise the reputation of your dungeon. Eventually you will have a world recognized masterpiece of a dungeon! Well, sort of. Admittedly it doesn't feel much like a dungeon most of the time.
Earning money! This can be done in a few different ways, such as through your tavern, selling items you've crafted, raiding other dungeons, and repelling adventurers. NDM functions predominantly as a building management simulator however. You have rooms you can build on floors, and must balance room placement and expansion, upkeep, improvements, hiring new minions, and new floors/rooms against your draining money pile.
Let's start with rooms. Each room you make can be defined by marking a series of rectangular sections. You can then place furniture, decorations, and most importantly doors in the rooms. Yeah, I'm serious about the doors by the way. First hour or two of playing I kept having issues where "rooms are not connected". Turns out I just hadn't put in a new door or replaced an old one while expanding. Each room has an upkeep (whether by minions working there, installed features, or taxes) associated and a star level. Room level can be improved by adding more fixtures or decorations. Higher rated rooms keep minions happier.
Now, important to note is that you'll have to expand rooms a fair amount, since you probably don't have the cash needed to make big expansions right away. Remember to always leave some room for expanding if needed. I didn't and then had to replot huge swathes of my dungeon later on. It was super frustrating. On that same train of thought, you can gain access to multiple floors, which minions can travel between, so consider separating some facilities as required. You need to be careful though, as attempting to upgrade rooms can leave you extremely short on funds. Remember, your minions still need to get paid, otherwise they may quit or strike.
Yup, that's right, your minions can quit or strike. If they get unhappy enough, they'll decide they've had enough. What determines this? Well, it depends on race and unit class level, but a simplified version is: room quality, available facilities, and production percentage. Room quality should be pretty self-explanatory: higher room star rating, the better. Available facilities may sound a little dumb, but different races require different things. For example, Drow have a certain penchant for rooming that means they aren't really a fan of the dormitories. Before you ask, yes, you can recruit Drow before you have access to their preferred living arrangements.
Actually, this problem is a bit more prevalent if you're going through the story mode. It is both possible, and quite likely, you will expand past your means, or at least attempt to but find yourself at a loss due to some facet you haven't unlocked yet. The Drow problem was my personal biggest frustration. The Drow specialize in spying, which is required for collecting intel used for raids, which I'll get to in a bit, but they require a specific room. Cue all my spies quitting on me because of this, and me wondering why I'm not earning intel. Well, it's because I don't have spies anymore. This problem isn't necessarily unique to Drow, as units can increase their levels, develop standards you no longer meet, and then quit on you before you have a chance to meet the requirements. You can always hire more lower leveled emplo- *ahem* minions, but then you have lower quality minions. A vicious cycle, especially since they can quit on short notice without your knowledge.
This leads to another potential issue: overspending. While creating, adjusting, and furnishing a room all have costs, which is told to you, it's really easy to put up a bunch of decorations in a room only to find out you've spent half your reserves in gold. Luckily the game makes you fully confirm you want to spend the money you've assigned prior to finalizing a room layout, but it can still get pretty costly.
Now, let's move onto some of the other aspects. First up, how about selling resources, crafting, and the store? If you build the proper room, and hire the correct minions, you can start producing weapons, tools, and other materials. You can sell these, predefine a percentage of wares to sell, or manually sell them. As you sell, the prices will actually fluctuate, so don't saturate the market or else you'll be selling for pennies.
In the store you can spend money on a one time purchase to unlock a decoration. Now I know what you may be thinking "why spend money on this?". Well, some are room specific, which gives a decent increase in the room reputation compared to the common decorations. These still need to be bought and placed, but are distinctly more space efficient than the common decorations, so that's always a positive.
Next up we have adventurer incursions! While you may have initially thought this game would feature more of this, the incursions are rather sporadic and generally handled without you needing to really do much. Sure you can set up traps, and alarms that alert the guards, but adventurers are a surprisingly small component. Once you've repelled the invaders that look to steal your treasure, you're awarded with some cash prizes, yay!
If you feel like being on the other end of the adventurer exchange, you can send your own minions out to raid other areas. Depending on where you choose, you may need to expend intel, select specific types of minions and races, and send them off to do their thing. Be careful though, as the owners of the other dungeons you're raiding won't like that and may decide to fire back at you. If your raid succeeds, you earn money and a sense of conquest, yay!
Now we come to some of the issues I've had with the game. First of all, making selections is kind of aggravating. It isn't always clear if you have what you want selected, sometimes it takes a little bit of backing out and reselecting to actually make a choice, and sometimes the game thinks you're in a state where you are trying to select something, but you aren't really, so you need to "cancel" in order to actually make a selection. In story mode, this is particularly noticeable during the little talking segments. Normally you can hit down on the D-Pad in order to begin the conversation, but sometimes you need to hit the back button a few times in order to allow you to start the talking.
This is actually a good piece of advice if a menu isn't working how you think it should: back out a few times and redo it. In addition to the above issue, it can sometimes be hard to tell what you have selected, as the game doesn't do the best job of letting you know what you've got up. It's a little annoying, but it doesn't happen often enough that it's game breaking. Also, the game will lag sometimes, especially while saving, so just be aware the game is probably saving if it starts lagging. Thankfully, while the game does act in "real time", you can pause or speed up time, making it easier to go through options and tasks.
There is a surprisingly large amount of goings on to keep track of in Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. While a wide breadth of options and mechanics is generally pretty nice, it can definitely get overwhelming trying to keep track of everything going on. Room renovations, adventurers invading, managing how content the workers are, sending out raiding parties, managing the stock market on your craftable resources, and keeping an eye on the store can all be a bit much when you're doing it at the same time. While there are some aspects you can relegate to the back-burner pretty easily, that doesn't mean you want to neglect them entirely.
Overall I'd say Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master meets it's goal: dungeon management simulating. While managing the dungeon can certainly be entertaining, there are a number of frustrating aspects included as well, such as somewhat awkward controls, difficulty selecting small objects, and some questionable unlock progression during story mode. On the other hand, building up your dungeon from scratch can feel quite rewarding, and getting it working like a well oiled machine certainly has it's perks. While Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master is probably a title more geared towards big fans of the management sim genre, there's still a lot to be had for less avid players if they're in the mood.
Score: 7 / 10
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