I absolutely adore anything roguelike, simply because it gives the player an almost infinite amount of possibility and creates a somewhat different experience to the game every single time you play it. That’s why when Fairy Tail decided to announce yet another new game, Fairy Tail: Dungeons, it was a no-brainer to jump on. Bringing all your favourite characters back to the palm of your hands for a semi-dungeon crawling romp fighting against monsters, and the darkness itself. Before jumping into it though, what is with the Fairy Tail IP at the moment? I get that the 100 Year Quest is happening right now, but our very own Oliver just covered Fairy Tail: Beach Vollyball Havoc. It seems Fairy Tail fans are eating well this year; it took long enough.

Punch and kick your way to victory.

The main idea of Fairy Tail: Dungeons is to delve into a dungeon and quite literally hop around until your lantern burns out, at which time a boss will show up, you beat the boss, and continue onto the new floor with a refilled lantern. Overall, it’s a pretty simple concept, especially for fans of games like Slay the Spire or Nowhere Prophet. The way battles work is you use energy to play what are essentially just cards, these dictate the attack your character will use.

One nice addition is that different attacks can chain together for higher damage or even interrupt enemies planning to use a high damage attack. There are other ways to cancel out attacks, like stunning them, or sometimes even just doing enough damage in one attack will do it. The game sets the requirement, so you don’t get absolutely throttled just because the boss has an attack that will hit you for almost your entire health pool.

Some of the bosses remind me of an enemy design you would find in Final Fantasy I or II.

So that’s enough about how the game plays, what about character selection? Well, to begin with there essentially is none. The issue is everyone wandered into these labyrinths and a decided to get lost. So as you progress through the levels and find event squares, you might stumble upon people that need help with one thing or another. Some of them will make themselves useful to you. How nice of them. Some, however, just won’t be helpful at all, not really providing much of use in most situations while you can easily ruin your run trying to make sure you do what’s been asked of it. Basically, just like any roguelike game, be careful about what challenges you take on to not absolutely ruin your attempt.

Hello, please don’t make me regret finding you.

Fairy Tail: Dungeons takes on an old school style of graphics, looking more like a SNES game than anything. It’s not giving any modern games in the same style a run for their money at all, I mean it’s put to shame by Five Nights At Freddy’s: Into The Pit, but that doesn’t mean it looks bad. Essentially it just doesn’t look impressive, just very middle of the road. There’s also not a lot to mention from a sound design standpoint. There’s some background music and a bit of sound effects when attacking and the like, but there’s really not much going on here.

It’s not the hardest roguelike out there, but it can have some challenge

Overall, Fairy Tail: Dungeons is a fun little romp around for a while. It’s not a game I see myself coming back to too often as there are just a lot of Roguelike games that do various aspects of its gameplay better, but it’s still a fun way to spend a few hours as you search around for some of your favourite characters.

Fairy Tail: Dungeons is available now on PC.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Fairy Tail: Dungeons was provided by the publisher.