Welcome to a fraternity of bros that like to rock, smash stuff, and kill anything that moves. Super Dungeon Bros is a rock-themed co-op dungeon brawler that never plays the same twice. This group of guys are not only the best of friends, but are truly bro-tastic to one another. Their banter among themselves can be playful, or crude — but it’s always entertaining.
The game starts out with each player selecting their desired character, and with names like Axl and Ozzie, it’s pretty obvious that rock-n-roll is here to stay. Each character starts out with their own specific weapon, each with their own pros and cons. But as you play through the game, more weapons are unlocked and become available. Each character’s level is reset upon starting a given world, and the character will get stronger as they progress through the levels of that world. Every character has a special ability or attack that’s unique to each of them; and these attacks get stronger the higher rank they reach. More characters and weapons will be unlocked as you progress through the dungeons, so the more ass you kick, the more fun things and people you’ll get to use and meet.
The game is designed for co-op play and working as a team is paramount to survival. The difficulty ramps up based on the number of people in your group, so don’t expect to beat a bad guy the same way in a group as you would if you were flying solo. If a boss is damaged more by a sword than a hammer, and only one guy brought a sword to the fight, the rest of you better get to eliminating the boss’ minions while the swordsman is taking on the boss. The more you play and learn, the better you will become at knowing what weapons to bring to the fight, and which weapons to leave at home. There are also co-op attacks like the Bro Throw & Bro Stack, which take co-op to the next level by making you stronger as a team and can multiply your attacks by combining the power of the group as one.
Every dungeon in the game is created randomly upon loading, so don’t expect to see the same place twice. The levels are designed based not only on who you are playing as, but also based on the number in your group. Their might be a door that you can open by yourself solo, but will require multiple switches if you are in a bigger group, forcing you to work together to get through that door. The dynamic and ever changing dungeons are a great concept that seems to be implemented well and the random levels should allow for a considerable amount of replayability.
If you are looking for co-op bros to play with you won’t be limited by your PS4 friends list. The PS4 version of the game will play with the Steam version on the PC (the Xbox One version cross-plays with the Windows 10 version). There are some limitations such as the inability to cross voice chat, but there is a contextual chat system to attempt to alleviate the lack of communication. How well all of that works remains to be seen, but it is a welcome addition that holds a lot of promise and we can only hope that more multiplayer games in the future have this feature.
To make players a little more competitive with each other, daily and weekly challenges will be posted by the development team, that will test how fast and efficient folks are within an identical dungeon, with leaderboards that track kills and items collected, and that will let you know how you ranked against their stats. With teamwork and strategy, this could become a tightly timed board with separations by a fraction of a second.
Super Dungeon Bros looks to be a fun game that is not only fast paced and easy to pick up and play, but highly entertaining with an immense amount of replayability. Scheduled for a Fall 2015 release, we are looking forward to spending more time in the Dungeons of Rökheim.
