Every once in a while, a game comes along that’s a must-have. Less often, that game is a mobile game. This is the case with Dungeon Village from Kairosoft.
Dungeon Village is part city builder, part RPG. Many phone apps fit this description, but one big difference is that Dungeon Village is not free to play, so you pay once and then you can play forever. For some people, this might be an issue. For the people out there who prefer paying for full games rather than being on the hook for several in-app purchases in the future, however, this is an attractive model.
Gameplay
So it’s not free-to-play, but what’s the actual gameplay like? Well, the game starts off by asking you to make an adventurer and name the town you’ve just become the mayor of. Your town starts as a tiny village with a lone adventurer, though others will soon join. This village you develop is the headquarters for all the adventurers that pass through.
As mayor, you can direct these adventurers to go on quests, which range from exploring haunted mansions to defeating monster mobs. These quests will help your adventurers gain experience and will help you level up and expand your town. On these quests, your adventurers will also find items that you can give as presents to boost a hero’s satisfaction level. This means you can play favorites in the development of your heroes.
Eventually, your heroes will want to move in to your town, at which point you can build houses for them (and start collecting taxes from them). Soon your tiny village will have bloomed into a bustling town filled with cake shops, combat schools and pubs. Of course, as your town and adventurers get stronger, so will the monsters attacking it. This means you can run your dungeon village for decades (well, in game years) without getting bored.
Lite Version
Although Dungeon Village is a “pay once and play forever” game, that doesn’t mean you have to take my word for how good it is. There’s a free lite version you can download before taking the plunge on the full game. If Dungeon Village sounds remotely interesting to you, go ahead and try the free demo version. There really aren’t many better ways to kill time on your iPhone.
If you like city builders and RPGs, give Dungeon Village a try. It’s only $4.99, but you can get hours of gameplay out of that without ever having to pay another cent, and without ever even feeling the pressure to. Once you’ve downloaded Dungeon Village and started guiding your town from a small outpost to a formidable force, you’ll wish there were more games out there like it.
