A dungeon crawler that fails to be compelling -- with no story, weak combat, & repetitive scenery and monsters.

User Rating: 4.5 | From The Abyss DS
Dungeon Crawlers ('Roguealikes') have come back into fashion with a few surprise hits like Atlus' Etrian Odyssey. Because of this success, we've seen quite a few released in the last year. Add to that list Aksys Games' "From The Abyss".

From the opening sequence, it shows some promise -- a short bit of opening story with some nice hand-drawn Anime stills introducing a queen in desperate times to seal a series of maze-like dungeons that have started overflowing with monsters, spawned from a deep-dwelling demon believed to have been banished many years before.

You select a character from 4 basic portraits, provide a name, and plunge in, either in single player or in local ad-hoc 2 player mode. You meet a nameless guard that introduces you to the dungeon, and you're off.

From there... it's downhill. The game descends into your solo character trotting about repetitive, mostly featureless landscapes, collecting a sparse collection of loot, and battling monsters. OK, it IS a dungeon crawler. Unfortunately, the real-time combat is horrid. It quickly becomes a button-mashing fest, with strikes of the sword on the A button, and magic spells assignable to the other buttons. I was able to advance through about 15 levels without dying simply by mashing the A button. When your character levels up, you get some points to disperse among your stats. It does have an affect, but if you're a melee fighter by choice, just bump strength and constitution, and you're nearly invincible. Magic uses have a tougher time, as you'll acquire spells pretty slowly, and those first spells are quite weak.

Monsters are dumb brutes -- they wander about the landscape waiting for you to get close enough to attack. But if you land a blow, you can keep mashing A and they won't get in counter-attacks, making killing them a tedious breeze.

Loot is very bland as well, with a standard assortment of weapons and armor, the odd potion (for mana or health), etc. So even the loot-grabbing aspects are very dull.

Overall, a very bland, repetitive, and near-shovelware title. If you're looking for better dungeon crawlers, I highly recommend Izuna 2, Lunar Knights, or Etrian Odyssey.