One More Dungeon 2 takes place, well, in a dungeon. You’ve been captured by weird snail people that have their own kingdom and forced to fight to help save it from some menacing unidentified creature. The snails are rather pushy about it too, so off you go into the dungeon with a sword and a magic staff to fight…well, who knows what. This is a game that’s designed for playing, not plot so don’t expect miracles from the story, even if the premise isn’t all that bad.
Gameplay is standard FPS fare. Swing your sword, fire your staff, kill the enemies. One More Dungeon 2 is procedurally generated so you’ll never see the same exact layout each time and when you inevitably die, you’ll be whisked back to snail jail and told that death is no escape, then sent back out to start all over again. As with most games of this style, you’ll collect items and the occasional permanent upgrade as you grab purple seals and unlock various areas of the snail palace. Levels are full of death traps, gold, curses, and an assortment of generic fantasy enemies like skeletons, rats, and bats. It’s not a complex design but it definitely works in terms of simple hack and slash gratification. Or, as it turns out, it should have worked.
What I was not expecting when I started playing One More Dungeon 2 was that the game would have a massively non-intuitive control scheme and no key binding in the menu system. On the Xbox, Your primary attack is locked to the right shoulder button and your staff attack is locked to the left shoulder button. Instead of a normal attack setup which uses the triggers, the developers locked jump to the right trigger and run to the left one. I tried everything under the sun to remap these to no avail. Not only are all attacks mapped to the shoulder buttons but controlling item slots in your inventory is weirdly difficult, leaving you accidentally using potions when you don’t need them and struggling to put weapons in the places you want them. The control scheme is an absolute disaster for the game.
Now this might not sound like a big deal but think about the ergo of a standard controller. Shoulder buttons are designed for occasional use, not constant button mashing, so when you start trying to do attack after attack with them, pretty soon your hands start to cramp up. You end up holding the controller at the wrong angle too, which means your thumbs aren’t on the sticks comfortably. The entire experience is just wrong somehow. Add to that jump and run buttons where you’d normally have fire buttons and you’ll end up running into enemies and jumping on traps when you’re trying to attack. It just doesn’t work.
If that wasn’t enough, there are also significant issues with the camera in One More Dungeon 2. The sensitivity and responsiveness of the camera controlled by the right stick is atrocious. Normally, most FPS games have a fairly natural camera that moves with your motions on the right stick and looks about fairly smoothly. Not One More Dungeon 2. Instead, you’ve got a slow, unresponsive camera that feels like it is moving through peanut butter. It just doesn’t like up to your movements fast enough. Unlike the control scheme, the devs thoughtfully included a slider for responsiveness on the camera, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work. Cranking up the responsiveness to this camera results in your aim jumping jerkily past the enemies rather than lining up on them. Combined with the frankly ridiculous control scheme, the end result is that you get walloped by even the weakest of enemies repeatedly and die pointless deaths in the game without making much progress. Even rats take 3 to 4 hits, mostly with you backpedalling and they’re virtually guaranteed to hit you if they get into sword range.
Of course, you could use your magic staff to shoot them from afar, but chances are you’ll miss them since the aiming reticule is so painfully unresponsive and you’ll run out of magical crystals for your staff after only a few enemies since you shoot like a stormtrooper, requiring you to hunt down more and relegating you to close in sword play, resulting in your rapid death. Wheee! Did I mention that there are three types of crystals and only one type powers whichever staff you start with? Yay for ammo you can’t use as well! You can find other weapons, but even bows burn up your crystals and eventually you’ll just be sword fighting until your inevitable doom no matter what you do.
Eventually, if you manage to tough out the hand cramps and irritation long enough, you’ll squeak by through a level or two and manage to get some purple seals and unlock various character classes and access to new areas of the game, but it’s a struggle that’s likely not worth your time and energy. The classes play a bit differently but the core issues with the game persist, leaving you to struggle vainly against the constraints of the system itself, which is perhaps a bit too much like real life these days.
Frustratingly enough, One More Dungeon 2 looks really great. The bouncy, cartoonish style of the game is clever and well-designed and the character designs are good. Enemies look vaguely menacing but cute and backgrounds and dungeons are detailed and interesting. There’s a lot going on here design-wise that makes it all the more frustrating that the game is very nearly unplayable on the Xbox. You legitimately want to explore and slash up a bunch of monsters and you just can’t. As for the soundtrack, it’s fairly generic and fades into the background pretty quickly. You’re not going to be going out and looking to download this one but it’s perfectly serviceable and the sound effects are good as well, so all in all, there’s a solid audio/visual package here.
While it looks like a good game from stills and videos, the unresponsive camera, bizarre control map, and constrained ammunition of One More Dungeon 2 make it difficult to actually play and progress in. All of these things could easily be fixed with a patch in the future and it honestly seems like the game would be a fun experience but as it stands now, even making limited progress is difficult, at least in the Xbox version of the game. A mapping and camera patch are absolute necessities before I can recommend One More Dungeon 2, which is a shame because it really did look like it would be a fun little time waster of an FPS. Right now though, it’s a title that’s better off avoided, even for the paltry $15 price tag.
This review is based on a digital copy of One More Dungeon 2 provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a 55” Sony 1080p TV. One More Dungeon 2 is also available for PS4/PS5, Switch, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.