Endless Dungeon makes escort missions cool again

polygon.com:

We all remember that one escort mission that made us want to pull our hair out. Maybe the target was too slow, kept failing to defend themselves, or got stuck on the geometry and started running into walls (here’s looking at you, Max Payne 2). There are exceptions to the rule — holding Yorda’s hand through Ico and getting everyone to a safe room in Left 4 Dead 2, for example — but broadly, I’ve learned to dread the appearance of an escort mission, lest it spoil the luster of an otherwise brilliant game.

Endless Dungeon is one big escort mission. An ambitious chimera of tower defense, roguelike, and twin-stick sensibilities, Endless Dungeon shipwrecks you on a lonely space station in the middle of a stellar graveyard. To reach the core and escape, you (and up to two other friends in co-op, or two AI companions when solo) have to pick a hero and shepherd your Crystal Bot between pockets of fleeting safety. All the while, waves of enemies spawn intermittently as you chart the floors, forcing you to build careful conglomerates of turrets to quell the mob. Maintaining the Crystal Bot’s health bar is paramount, as the crab-legged machine is the only means of opening up the exits that will take you deeper into the station’s treacherous numbles. If it goes boom, you’re going back to the saloon, which acts as a Hades-like hub between runs where you can have a natter and buy upgrades with your takings.

The Crystal Bot has all the hallmarks of an annoying escort — it’s painfully slow and extremely vulnerable (less so with mid-game upgrades) — but Endless Dungeon makes the process of defending it cerebral. A rewarding feedback loop is achieved by obscuring the mucky optics of an escort mission in an onion’s worth of layered systems.