Ehrgeiz: Dungeon Mode

I gave the dungeon mode of Ehrgeiz a spin the other day and it didn't seem to have anything at all in common with the arcade fighting game mode. Arcade mode was a pretty standard 3D fighting game with combos and moves and such. Dungeon mode uses the same 3D movement but otherwise doesn't seem to have a lot in common. It's more of a full on action-adventure-RPG. Walk into a room, kill the enemies that spawned in the room, pick up the loot they dropped. Repeat. You start off as a guy and if he dies you restart back in town as a girl. At level 1. With no weapons or healing items. And with a cleared out dungeon. I saw all my guy's loot drop on the ground where he died so it seems possible that I could get down to it Wizardry V style and get all my gear back. The first time this happened she just died right away. The second time I got lucky and had a weapon drop off the first random respawn.

The game has the interesting and/or terrible game mechanic where you have to spend in game currency in order to save. I guess this is try to curve save/reload shenanigans but it was a huge problem when I wanted to go to bed shortly after being forced to respawn in town as the girl who had nothing at all. I eventually found a room with a lot of mushrooms growing, filled my inventory up, ran back to town, and sold them for enough money to save. But it feels like if I want to save in order to turn the console off (and not to save/reload a hard fight) that it should just let me.

There wasn't much of a plot thus far. My two characters were going on an adventure, got knocked out by something, and woke up in a strange town near a dungeon. Now we're crawling the dungeon. It's not really enough of a hook to interest me, and the 3D combat is actually pretty tedious. Find a long range weapon like a spear. Hit attack until all the enemies are dead. Hope they don't stunlock you.

I feel obligated to keep playing it because of the marathon, but this is a pretty offshoot game and doesn't seem very good at all. I think I'll give it another spin on the weekend and see if I can't get into it more because I don't want to just skip it.