When it comes to making a multiplayer title that lets three players work together to complete a mission within a stage-by-stage setup, Ronimo Games has you covered! With publisher Devolver Digital backing them up, they have released Blightbound on Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. With this new team-based experience available to players, it is worth going over the details of this fun yet overtly straightforward game.

Story

After the dreaded Shadow Titan had been slain through a fierce battle, the heroes of this grand fight found their celebration to be short-lived. From the husk of the Shadow Titan flowed a new evil called the Blight. This corrupting fog would alter any living creature exposed to it and cause evil to spread across the land.

Gameplay

Every dungeon crawl is approached by a three-person team. This team consists of one barbarian, one rogue, and one mage. Each character can choose which of these roles they want to take before the match begins. The purpose for having this every run is due to each warrior having their own abilities and uses - plus, an overall balance to the gameplay.

As you clear one of the nine dungeons available, you will come across puzzles, enemies, and countless breakables with valuables in them. Each dungeon has its own overarching goal to be accomplished, but it is best to explore them in full for as many valuables as possible. You can also find fallen survivors which will sometimes turn out to be a new hero to join your base.

While each team will have one of each class, the heroes themselves have a range that grows with the more survivors you find. Each class has a total of seven heroes in them, each one sporting their own move set that can not be altered. Essentially, when you find the hero with the move set you like most, you would switch to them. But fighting with heroes you only kind of enjoy or at least come close to your preference is worth it since you earn unique coins, find items, and can unlock chapters to that specific character’s story along the way.

Playing as each class is worth the experience, not only because they have different play styles and are entertaining in their own right, but because they earn a different unique coin each. These coins can be used at your campgrounds blacksmith to make different items. Sure, you can sometimes find what you need at the merchant’s shop, which is refreshable after each dungeon run, but when it comes to getting the legendary gear you will need to craft your way down to it. In short, you can craft a green-grade weapon that will help you make a blue-grade weapon that will help you make a legendary-grade weapon. There are other alterations, but you’ll have to look into the merchant and blacksmith for yourself.

As you complete dungeons, you will also gain experience for your campgrounds as well as your character. As your camp levels up, more rewards become available to you. As your character levels up, the more stat points you can place on them. Ultimately, these better levels and better equipment will allow you to challenge higher-level dungeons that will give better loot. The higher you climb the better the drops.

If you find yourself playing this game by yourself or only have one friend to join you, they did add a “play with bots” option to fill in the remaining roles. While this will definitely get the job done, they definitely aren’t the brightest. I would say they are handy and useful during the first six or seven difficulty levels, but anything higher than that and they are just frustrating to use. If the mage is a bot, expect healing to happen at bad times and for them to even spam it so they run out of their limited uses quickly. Completing the puzzles with the pads can sometimes make them get confused and just stand there, making you stuck in limbo until you get them to work with you. There are just aspects that need to be improved on to really be useful throughout the game.

Visuals and Audio

To pull off the 2.5 side-scrolling visual, they gave the overall world a sort of zoomed-in effect that kept the focus on the whole party, limiting players from splitting up. The entire game had a cartoon-style artwork to it that helped make the grotesque creatures of the blight less scary and stand out as individual creatures. Overall, a great choice for what they were aiming for.

As for the music and sound effects, they were pretty standard. The music was very low majority of the time and was more there to just fill the silence of various areas, especially base camp. I did like that each blight creature had their own sounds though since each type of creature differed in attack, movement, and overall design.

Replayability

Tons of replayability with this one! As long as you are having fun, you can always load up another game and clear another dungeon. The higher your level, the more dungeon options you have since the RNG of the dungeon difficulty won’t affect you as much. Plus, all 21 heroes have their own unique story to unlock, so there is a long-term goal that can help drive you to go through specific dungeons.

What Could Be Better

There are actually more things here than I would have expected during my first few hours in this game. It wasn’t noticeable at first, but the base camp level system is actually quite bare. So many levels are can be reached and it literally gives you no reward. Why even both bringing the camp up to level 50 if you aren’t going to have a new reward for each level reached? Just lower the number of levels the camp can reach and adjust the rewards so that there is something given to the player every time they level it up. Getting the camp to a new level and having the game not reward you for it in any way feels like an annoying pop-up notification more than anything.

Why are there only nine dungeons to play through and every run through it is pretty much the same thing? Sure, there is some RNG when it comes to the dungeon's difficulty, but other than how hard it is to complete it, the dungeon itself is the same thing. Puzzles have the same answers, pathways are the same… where is the variety?

The weapons damaging levels are way too close together. The difference between a legendary weapon and a blue-tier weapon is roughly 20 points. That is nothing! You start off with a weapon doing around 50 damage, upgrade to something doing 65-75, end up getting it up to 85-95, then you can find the gear that can be around 105-115, and then legendary stuff does 135. Why not make it do legendary damage? With these light increases in the gear, the player’s strength and power increase are pretty much dependent on their stats alone.

Conclusion

Blightbound is a fun dungeon crawler to play with friends, but the simplicity behind it definitely hurts the long-term experience. The good news here is that everything wrong with the game can be updated, so with a little work they can really turn this game around! It isn’t even bad in its current state though. It’s entertaining, a solid co-op experience, challenging, and led by player choices. All the elements of a great dungeon crawler are here, but there is room for improvement.