It’s Adventure Time today at Z1G headquarters, which is why you’re currently enjoying my review of the dungeon-crawler Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon because I DON’T KNOW.

Adventure Time (of which I am a huge fan), has surprisingly rich and rewarding lore surrounding it, and with imaginative characters and environments, a video game set on the TV show practically writes itself. So, did WayForward Technologies do justice to the source material?

In short, no.

In the show, the main characters have been sucked inside video games, they’ve travelled to lumpy space and they’ve battled all manner of colourful villains. In Explore the Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW, they explore a dungeon.

The plot is more easily summarised than in any of Mario’s adventures. There’s a dungeon, so explore it. No twists or turns. Nothing at stake, besides treasure and a few extra playable characters selected arbitrarily from the cast list.

The plot would not matter if the gameplay was engaging enough to hook the player for hours on end. The combat involves using either your chosen character’s primary attack or a secondary weapon to defeat legions of relentless enemies that clog up the levels like algae in a fish-tank.

Whilst the combat is understandably simple and easy to master, it is a game for children after all, this does not excuse the painful repetition. Once the player has gotten through one level of the dungeon, they have more or less played every level of the dungeon, with only slightly upgraded enemies and new-side weapons to try and fail to keep proceedings from going stale.

The combat has a major flaw in that the hit-detection is diabolically bad. The enemies seem to be designed to annoy the player, flitting in for sucker punches before darting out of range again, whilst the player flails their sword from side to side, hoping to find purchase. There are range weapons, such as the kitten gun, but these fire rather lethargically in a straight line and are easily dodged, making them practically useless.

There is a boss fight every 10 levels with one of the shows baddies, and these are probably the highlight of the game, but the sheer, unadulterated grind that proceeds each boss makes the experience ultimately not worth it.

The levels all look exactly the same, with the occasional pallet swap being the only thing that spruces up the visuals.

The graphics are unashamedly retro, with tiny, pixelated sprites and bland, two-tone environments. It would have given the game so much character if WayForward had had the shows creators make cutscenes for them, like in the fantastic Ni no Kuni or recent memory, but no. The player is given cheap, unsatisfying cut-scenes that look as if they were knocked up on paint in somebody’s lunch break.

They did obtain the services of the shows voice actors, and at first, hearing my favourite characters yelling through the dungeons made it all worthwhile. The familiar voices are probably the only thing to remind the player that they are actually playing an Adventure Time, and not just a generic dungeon crawler.

Unfortunately, they didn’t get enough from the voice actors, and as the repetition of the combat and level design start to niggle at the player, the lines spouted over and over again from favourite characters become drab and annoying. The ability to play as multiple characters is a blessing in disguise, as it means the player can get bored of a different characters 10 lines of dialogue.

Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW’s only saving grace is that it can be played co-op. The repetition can be abated by camaraderie, and my lovely co-op partner and I actually enjoyed in small chunks.

But as the level number rises higher and higher, there’s a distinct lack of progression. With no levelling up system, there’s no reason for the player to go out of his way to fight anything other than treasure, which can be used to buy more weapons and upgrade the characters.

Whilst treasure is useful, Explore the Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW has a truly stupid feature in which when the player is allowed back to town every 5 levels (and not before!), any treasure they don’t spend will be taken off of them as they leave. I’m going to give you a minute to reflect on what a pointless and infuriating idea that is.

It means the player cannot save up for items, and it makes the more valuable items very difficult to afford. The player simply has to splurge all of the treasure they have painstackingly collected up on something pointless and unnecessary, like a key that opens up random gates through-out the levels that usually lead to less treasure than they cost to buy.

Being the first Adventure Time branded game on home consoles, and due to the fact that it was released on practically every platform, it was always going to sell well amongst the legion of kiddywinks who consider themselves fans of the show. Many of these fans will have never played a dungeon crawler.

On one hand, this might mean that it will take them longer to get sick of it. On the other, it might put them off dungeon crawler’s for life, and that would be a crying shame.

I am a fan of dungeon crawlers, and I am a fan of the show Adventure Time. Any gambler would put all their money on me loving this game, yet I was left disappointed. WayForward should have called this game ‘Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because WE DON’T CARE’.

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