DungeonSmash – Medieval Dungeons

Genre: Arcade Brick Breaker

Players: 1

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Review:

DungeonSmash is an Arcade-style Brick Breaker with a Medieval theme, released on Nintendo Switch in 2024. In this game, players swat dozens or even hundreds of balls to clear the game’s levels.

The presentation for this game uses 2D pixel art visuals that are sufficient, but extremely repetitive – every level uses the same background of a castle wall at night with two Medieval guys trading sword blows back and forth on the left side of the screen. This is joined by a really dour title theme and no music during gameplay, only unimpressive impact sounds for balls until you hit an explosive block and that sounds at least decent… but otherwise, this game sounds horrible and looks repetitive and dull.

Turning to the gameplay, the core gameplay in DungeonSmash is fairly straightforward Brick Breaker fare – move your paddle left and right, try to bounce balls up to destroy blocks, you know the drill. What sets this game apart is that the pickups that blocks drop as they’re destroyed frequently include multipliers that make all balls on-screen split into three, and the effect of these is cumulative. In other words, if you quickly snag three of these in a row, your one ball will split into three, then nine, and then twenty seven balls, all in the span of a few seconds. By the end of the level, you could have literally dozens or possibly even a hundred balls bouncing around on-screen.

There’s something visceral and satisfying about unleashing a massive flurry of balls on the screen, and the game’s at-times massive levels give these balls plenty of room to expand into. However, while this gameplay element is fun to watch and sets the game apart from others in the genre, it also has the effect of making the majority of this game’s levels an absolute cakewalk – just keep grabbing up multipliers, and you don’t even need to bother with using your (extraordinarily large for the genre) paddle to save balls – there’s plenty remaining to keep you from losing.

This makes for such an unbalanced experience that as the game progresses, later levels are designed to be frustratingly restrictive just to give this game some semblance of challenge, with levels where you only have one or two narrow holes you can aim for, in a wall of unbreakable bricks. Unfortunately, this game does a poor job with Brick Breaker physics, with only very limited ability to use the paddle to aim your ball, and I’ve even seen balls inexplicably change direction in mid-air for no reason. The game’s levels exploiting these terrible physics to make it difficult for you to make headway feels like an extremely artificial way to impose challenge, overcorrecting for one problem with the game by imposing another.

The Nintendo page for this game claims that there’s also a level editor and player-designed maps available, but I was unable to locate either of these features, and it’s not like there were many menus to get lost in to begin with. As far as I can tell, this feature is just a straight-up lie.

In the end, I can’t say that I didn’t get a little enjoyment out of DungeonSmash, because seeing massive numbers of balls tearing apart each stage is satisfying on a base level. But when it comes to gameplay, this made for a shallow experience, and the presentation is also terribly lacking. And the one highlighted feature this game claims to have in its custom-designed levels is apparently MIA, leaving only disappointment in its wake. Despite those moments of enjoyment, I don’t recommend getting this game.

tl;dr – DungeonSmash is an Arcade-style Brick Breaker with a Medieval theme where players have a ridiculous amount of balls on-screen at a time. This can be viscerally satisfying, but the core gameplay is terribly shallow, the presentation is repetitive and dull, and the advertised level creator is nowhere to be found. While you may get a brief guilty pleasure from this game, overall it simply isn’t worth it.

Grade: D+

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