Dungeon Scroll Review
Great casual game circa 2000
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Decent word creation gameplay, similar in essence to Boggle, no technical issues.
Graphics are horrible, game mechanics could be substantially but easily improved
Synopsis:
Dungeon Scroll 2.0 is a decent word making game provided you don't mind the fact that the graphics make it look like it was written ten years ago.
Analysis:
The framework is that you're fighting a set of creatures in a series of dungeons, using a set of tiled letters to create words that damage the creatures you're fighting. The monsters have a health bar that drops as you create words with your tile set, while your health bar drains at a constant rate. This acts as a timer that you can replenish with health potions or power-ups, and refreshes after the death of each monster. Additional power-ups appear during play, such as the "oracle" tile that creates the best possible word from your set of tiles, or tiles that increase damage or refresh your tile set.
While playing, the game feels quite a bit like Boggle; trying to create a set of unique words before the time runs out, with a few strategic twists to keep it from being completely stale.
Problems:
For each dungeon you can use each word you create only once, and there is no running list of words that you've already used. Bonus letters are occasionally added as you defeat monsters, but these bonus tiles are consumed when you use them. Unless you use a special tile to refresh your set, you're stuck with pretty much the same set of letters. I found myself losing track of which words I'd used in a particular dungeon and wasting a significant amount of time. This could have been easily corrected by having a running list of words used for that dungeon (or at least the most recent dozen or so) somewhere on the screen during play.
My biggest problem with the game is that it looks terrible. The "dungeon" consists of a box with a poorly rendered corridor in which the creature of the moment appears and cycles through its set of five or six poses. The text is pixelated and unflattering, and the game really looks like it was made ten years ago.
There were no technical issues with the game. The game installed fine on XP, launched quickly and didn't have any crashes.
Though fun to play, I wouldn't pay money for this when there are similar word creation games available for free, and ones that do the RPG element MUCH better.