Endless Dungeon is a shockingly fun tower defense and roguelike mash-up

digitaltrends.com:

Sega-owned developer Amplitude Studios has made a name for itself with 4X strategy games. The 4X subgenre is all about exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating (hence its name) and Amplitude has become a pro at it through games like Humankind and its long-running Endless series.

However, the next Endless game, Endless Dungeon, isn’t a strategy game. Rather, it’s a unique mix of a twin-stick shooter, tower defense, and roguelike. Building on a formula first explored in an experimental 2014 game Dungeon of the Endless, Amplitude Studios wants to show that its 4X expertise applies to more action-heavy games with Endless Dungeon. “What we want to show is that strategy and tactics can take a lot of different forms,” Amplitude Studio head Romain de Waubert told Digital Trends in an interview. “Endless Dungeon is one of those forms where you can explore tactics with friends during intense action. If you like how we look at strategy in 4X, then I’m pretty sure you’d love how we look at strategy in action. There is a commonality between the two because it’s the same people working on both.” I went hands-on with Endless Dungeon’s first OpenDev (Amplitude’s in-house version of early access) build and discovered that roguelikes and tower defense games have a lot more in common than I thought. There are some clear improvements that can be made, but Amplitude Studios is definitely on track to become more than a one-genre studio with Endless Dungeon.

In Endless Dungeon, you play as an eclectic cast of sci-fi heroes trying to escape a space station that they are marooned on. To do this, they must guard and guide a Crystal Bot from Crystal Slot to Crystal Slot throughout the space station. If they die or the Crystal Bot is