Story:
There is something of a story here, but it doesn’t make much sense and seems to be fractured. The game tells the story in its tutorial explanations and while talking with townspeople and running errands for them but tells it very poorly. To the point that you find yourself not caring at all for the story and instead focus on the core of the gameplay, which leaves much to be desired.
Gameplay:
Super Dungeon Maker is as its name suggests, a tool to create dungeons with the goal to share it so that other players can experience what you’ve created. The secondary aspect is that it’s an action RPG similar to that of Zelda and Reverie.
You play as a chicken (rooster?) that explores dungeons to solve puzzles, clear rooms of enemies, and at the end of it, collect a giant golden egg.
Now with the dungeon maker component of the game being at the forefront, you would think that it would be a very fluid and amazing experience, but that’s just not the case.
You have a cursor or a hand tool that transitions from traveling along a grid to free movement on its own. It moves on a grid in the main portion of the maker space, and then to free movement when moving closer to the UI buttons. Because it does this automatically, it can make the creation aspect difficult.
You can create dungeons and share them with other players and even have codes you can give to friends so that they can play your dungeon, but you must pass the dungeon first before you can publish it, which is fair and an aspect that I really appreciate.
While playing one of the game’s dungeons, a dungeon you find online, or one you’ve made yourself, the game plays the same across the board. You go from room to room and work to complete the dungeon by one of the means listed above.
Not unlike Zelda, you can collect things like a feather to make you jump, a hook shot or as the game calls it a grappling hook, compass, bombs, shield, map, keys, etc. Like I said before, it very much takes its cues from Zelda and similar games that came before it.
Aside from the things I mentioned above, another aspect of the gameplay that I don’t like is how slow you move. Your character looks and feels like it’s moving through syrup and makes it very difficult to want to continue through to the end of the dungeon or even continue beyond the first dungeon you play in for that matter.
Graphics and Performance:
The in-game graphics are vibrant and colorful. The cartoony look to everything and the bright colors make everything pop off the screen and really breathe life into an otherwise rather lacklustre experience. Animation is smooth for the most part. Chests open, enemy animation is smooth, along with the rest of the animated effects, making you appreciate the amount of time and work that went into this game, at least in that aspect.
Performance in the game is something that definitely falls short. The slow character movement I mentioned above, coupled with the sluggishness the game experiences with too many large enemies in one area, make for a terrible time. In addition to the game slowing down due to too much on screen, there were times where the game would completely lock up to the point I had to restart the entire Switch.
So, to sum up performance, this game was very poorly optimized to run on any iteration of the Switch that I played it on, if it was even optimized at all. Which, given the fact that it’s a 2D game running on a platform much more capable than the 3DS which did this very well with Super Mario Maker 3DS, paints a rather grim picture of the performance department.
Sound:
Sound? There’s sound in this game? I mean sure, the enemies have sounds that they make, and chests make sounds when opened, but as with performance, the sound department is rather lacking. The game has background music for the dungeons, but this fluctuates in volume and is more often than not drowned out by the sounds of solving puzzles, opening doors, or gathering items from chests.
Oh right, I mentioned enemy sounds. Well, yes, they all have sounds and not unlike the previous ones mentioned, those too have a tendency to drown out the background music while traversing the dungeons. To add on to this, the enemy sounds aren’t just a couple and then it goes back to something like background music, no, these sounds are on repeat most of the time. There is nothing like hearing the hiss of a worm repeatedly screeching in your ear while simultaneously drowning the background music is just the best soundtrack to play while solving that meticulous puzzle.
The above-mentioned scenario didn’t happen every time but happened enough to the point where I found myself either trying to get as quickly as I could to the next room or just shutting off my Switch in frustration.
Conclusion:
If you’re looking for the definitive Zelda-like game that lets you create dungeons to your heart’s content, you should look elsewhere at alternatives to this game as there are ones out there. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a rather slow-paced action-adventure game that looks gorgeous on the screen, then look no further than Super Dungeon Maker. This game does have a lot of flaws and isn’t a great game but does bring a lot of neat things to the table in a very pretty package. If I wasn’t given this for review, it would be a game I would pick up during an eShop sale as I really don’t see it being worth its asking price.
Jon’s thoughts
I wanted to like this game; I really did. The premise seemed solid enough and it baffles me that Nintendo has not gone all out with the idea. But playing it immediately poured cold water on my face and made me realize this is just not the experience that it wants to be. I played a level Ryan created and uploaded, but when it was my turn to create a level, I was not having much luck.
The interface and tools are not intuitive, and I kept accidentally destroying my own work. What I did manage to create was lacking due to the tools available, and the sluggish gameplay and lack of variety made me not want to explore the levels online. There was so much that could be done here but the problem is the game was released on Switch way too soon.
The development is still ongoing, and this feels like the skeleton of a game and not the finished product. I feel the hype involved may have hurt the game in the end, especially with others following that offer more. Perhaps down the line Super Dungeon Maker will be vastly improved, but I guess we will need to wait and see.
Disclaimer – Review keys were provided
