• Price: $6.99 USD
• Developer/Publisher: Brainium Games
• Release Date: May 16, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by Brainium Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Dungeon Arsenal is described as a “fast-paced roguelike card game” in which you pass through randomly generated floors to find weapons and items cards that will help you survive the monsters hiding on each floor. It has 4 difficulty levels and a decent variety of things to unlock.

When you start your first playthrough, you get to choose one of the 3 initially available heroes (3 other hero classes can be unlocked later by fulfilling certain conditions). Rogue, Warrior, and Dwarf are your options in the beginning. Each class has their own bonus ability.

They included a basic story about adventurers trying to reach the top of a tower said to contain an arsenal of rare weapons. This tower – which you’ll be climbing yourself – has 5 different “Sectors” with 10 levels each. Although they’re randomly generated every time you start a new run, each Sector will always have multiple floors with regular monsters, 1 Treasure Room, 1 Shop, and a boss room at the end.

On each floor you’ll see face-down cards; to climb the tower you have to reveal the card with the stairs. In the process of uncovering cards, other cards with monsters, weapons, or helpful items like potions will appear. You only get 5 action points to use per turn, and revealing a card uses a point.

Each weapon or item card has its own durability value and action point requirement to use, and some cards even have special effects. Drag weapon cards – with the Joy-Cons or touchscreen – onto a revealed enemy to attack them. They’ll counterattack unless you use a bow card or if your next attack finishes off their HP.

You have to be very strategic about the cards you choose to reveal and use. All that really matters is that you find the stairs to advance; you don’t have to reveal every card on a floor if you don’t want to. The game has a meter that tells you if there are more or less enemies on a floor, and it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the risk to flip over more cards to get weapons/items and possibly get more enemies instead.

It’s possible to skip over uncovered enemies, and I often did so to conserve my cards’ durability points to use later. Going to the next floor without destroying an enemy card results in 1 damage to your HP per skipped opponent, but it might be worth it depending on the enemies’ attack values as well as your current hand and HP.

Each character class also has an Epic Card (on the right), which can be played once the Special Gauge under you is full. Again, I tended to save those for boss floors. Regular monsters tend to have 1-4 HP, but bosses have 10 or more. While the regular monsters only attack if you attack them first with melee weapons/if they’re still alive at the end of a turn, bosses do the same thing but they also attack you every few seconds.

I really like how we get 3 new cards every turn in a boss battle. You still have to spend action points to turn them over, but this means that you don’t have to worry if you don’t have enough weapons by the time you reach the boss for each Sector. Thankfully, some of the new cards frequently include a staff card, which heals you when discarded.

You get a relic for defeating each boss, and they can also be found on each treasure and shop floor. Their effects can be extremely useful; I particularly liked the one that lets you survive an attack that would have killed you. Sadly there’s a limit to the number of relics you can have equipped in each run, and you can’t swap them out.

The game is a lot more complex than one might think at first glance. I had a lot of trouble getting past the third Sector for a while. But once I figured out how to manage my cards and actions more strategically, I finally ended up clearing some runs. There are a decent amount of unlockables, such as the additional classes, special card borders, and special weapons acquired by fulfilling certain conditions.

Others may not find this very difficult, but personally I appreciated how challenging it was even on Normal Mode. As far as the gameplay is concerned, I will say that it seems to lack some diversity in the attack cards. There were a lot of standard melee weapons, but I only recall seeing one or two long range weapons (including the bow). You can unlock a cleric class, but there isn’t a mage, and they didn’t include any spell cards (fire, ice, lightning, etc) or area of effect cards.

My only other real concern was the text size, as I thought it was pretty small. (I only played in handheld mode.) The graphics are fairly simple, but I thought they were charming in an “old school” kind of way. Overall, Dungeon Arsenal is reasonably priced, and it could be a nice little strategy game for you to play on breaks, as each run took me 15-20 minutes at most.