![]() However, the devs say that special class-specific hotkey attacks are in the pipeline. Using them at the right moment is important, but, again, it is a relatively slight means of exerting your influence over the battle. ![]() These provide all your troops with a boost to health, damage, speed or endurance. You’re given a smidgen of additional agency in deciding when to slug potions. You can try and tempt the aggression of individual enemies before kiting them away from their pack, and you can choose to focus your mob on particular threats with insistent clicking - but these are the only positional tools at your disposal to massage the odds in your troops’ favour. That said, some minor AI variance means range units tend to hang back a bit of their own volition, while melee units launch themselves in - but you are given no direct control over this. You don’t get a say over which you get, or have a right of refusal, and you have no individualised control over the units either - you can’t drag-select a portion of your troops and control only them: everyone moves as a single pack, swamping enemies as a mob. Your mob starts as mere peasantry but, as you unlock classes through grind, your loot-hoovering serfs upgrade themselves by pulling the newly-available class-costumes from treasure chests. ![]() Although you fight monsters too, there’s a limit to the tactical expression currently possible in the game. This dexterity challenge is really the core of the game - the one way in which the skill of the player is expressed. It has some momentum too, and, as you weave out of the way of flamethrowers and cannonfire, it’s easy to overcommit to a direction and have your numbers trimmed by a saw-blade. Sometimes your numbers are such that it's quite a squeeze - you may need to press your army into a wall, shaping their formation into a column before threading it between spike-traps or explosives. Corralling your troops is an unusual and appealing exercise in fluid dynamics, dragging the jiggling mass down corridors, cascading over obstacles, coalescing on you cursor-point as you shimmy them between lethal hazards. ![]() They have some autonomy - individuals will break rank to swipe loot or set upon enemies, but sustained long clicks will drag them back into a central throng. There's no micromanagement here, though: holding down your mouse button directs your entire mob of peasants to bundle towards that single point. You control not one hero, but several, simultaneously. However, unlike in some of the other more naked number traps, like Clicker Heroes, Super Dungeon Run appends a game to the grind, and it’s a rather jolly one - albeit, at this stage of development, a lot slighter on tactical participation than a lot of other dungeon crawlers. What surely started out as a way of abstractly representing actual progress - making numbers go up - is now seen as progress in itself. In games, just as in high finance it seems, we sometimes allow the numbers themselves to become our masters. In Super Dungeon Run, gold buys you the means to acquire more gold, and it’s a feedback loop I fundamentally don’t really get, which is why I will never be asked to work for Goldman Sachs. But I like gold because of all the other nice things gold can buy me. They are willing to throw their lives away for it, bundling into dungeons full of whirring sawblades and spiketraps, diving headlong into ogres and goat-headed necromancers as though they were skittles. This week he’s been playing Super Dungeon Run, a chirpy top-down brawler that combines Diablo’s procedurally organised goblin grinding with Pikmin-ish mob control. Each week Marsh Davies picks up his cudgel and pelts into the dank depths of Early Access, thrashing wildly, returning with any stories he can find, if he returns at all.
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