Grindy-looty goodness awaits in Finder's Keep, a sleek new dungeon crawler with turn-based RPG elements for iOS from Big Blue Bubble (makers of Muse). Choose your avatar and start your looting adventure through a never-ending tower full of goodies and baddies. An excellent tutorial will walk you through the first few levels, showing you the ropes and explaining how to manage all the booty. You tap your way through mist-covered floors of the tower picking up lots of armor, weapons and materials, as well as meeting gruesome enemies in dark corners. The design of this game shines in the balance between the items you collect and the enemies you meet. A tarnished shield is just a shield until you reinforce it with the dust of unneeded items you've dismantled, or fuse it to a shard you've collected. Now you have a 4-star Aegis of the Dragon that can block just about anything those monsters throw at you. And that's just in the first 15 levels!
This game is free to play, but it does have in-app purchases (IAP). Fortunately, they aren't pushed on you at every turn, but easily available if you need them. You can only buy diamonds, the main currency in the game. There are certainly times when you need them... to open more space in your armory, or bring you back to life in an especially difficult level. The good news: the game gives you diamonds as you go. They are a rare drop in certain floors of the tower, and occasionally the devs drop one in your inbox as a gift, so it's not necessary to buy them. It just means some areas will take longer to master. It's worth the wait, though, when an ornate chest yields a Mythical Helm.
The game drips with details, and they are beautifully organized in the small space of the iPhone screen. You not only manage your spoils, but you also manage the action points and equipment points you win as you level up. The first limits how many towers you can enter and the second limits the quality of the equipment you can carry with you. Over time, you'll win up to six spaces for different configurations of armor and battle abilities. Each of your plundered items impacts your strength, constitution and dexterity, which have a direct affect on your health and attack. Strategizing between the kind of equipment you use and the battle abilities you choose can make the difference between beating a floor or falling in battle. This is one of those games that will suck you in and keep you coming back for the new daily content and the promise of even better, shinier loot.
Finder's Keep (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad)
NOTE: This game was played and reviewed on the iPhone. Game was available in the North American market at the time of publication, but may not be available in other territories. Please see individual app market pages for purchasing info.
I have to say that this is truly an awful game. Although well done and detailed, it seems to pack in as many annoying and hostile elements as possible:
1) You only have so many Equipment Points, so you cant even wear the nice shiny new armor you got. Or have to wear it and be nekked elsewhere.
2) You cannot change equipment in a dungeon. If you choose poorly, sucks to be you.
3) There are monsters called Golems that have to be HIT X number of times (43 was the highest I got to). Thats 43 rounds of combat to kill it, regardless of how much damage you normally do! Yawn.
If you happen to run into a golem, and don't have "Armor Breaker" weapon or ability then you are hozed. BTW you can only have THREE skills selected..even your basic attack counts as one. This number can never go up.
4) Lifesteal monsters. Even if they hit for 0 damage, they heal like 2/3rds of their life every round without fail!
If you happen to encounter this, hope you took at least 1 or 2 Big Attack skills, or you literally will never ever ever defeat them.
5) Wind up monsters. They all the sudden hit you for a TON of damage. There is no good way to predict when they are "winding up" for their big attack. If there were, youd still have to take Block as one of your 3 Skills and use at the right time.
6) There is a big boss that randomly comes along and kicks your teeth in. His strength is not dungeon-specific. However far you got is forfeited after losing. If you DO win, your reward is that he randomly comes back in his next more-powerful form to bend you over.
7) Dungeons require Action Points to enter. These take lots of realtime to build up. So the usual annoying energy system.
8) Your inventory is limited. Must PAY rare currency to boost it.
9) Hard to predict what monsters are in a given dungeon, without writing them all down.
10) some monsters are weak in a dungeon, and some are ridiculously strong. Difficulty varies hugely.
11) The Color-System isnt intuitive and a Red dungeon may also have other colored-monsters.
12) A weapon of X color does very little if any damage vs an X color monster. This can lead to no-win situation.
13) You cannot LEAVE a dungeon once you enter...without forfetiting everything, or finding the exit at the last floor.
14) If you run from a fight, chances are it will block you and there is no way around it. Thus you forfeit all.
[Spoilers added to conserve space. -mod]
Whatever you do, do NOT pay actual money. Due to a glitch my premium currency packs costed 0 instead of 5 gems, so I opened hundreds and hundreds of them, and was outfitted like a king!
However it didn't really matter all that much mostly due to the Item Points. To get anywhere, its mostly about level grinding. XP does not seem to matter how many critters you killed.
So just find a 1-floor dungeon you can do fast that is maybe the 3rd hardest you can handle and run thru it repeatedly after gearing for it. Preferably without the effing Golems.
Quality of your gear doesnt matter much either. The gear is about equally good per Equipment Point even at legendary. You just want to make sure that you keep armor items for ALL COLORS, and at least a few different color weapons.
That way, you can ensure you have some Damage resistance for each dungeon, and ideally an item that "reduces X color damage significantly" or whatever. That applies first to apply a percentage, then your flat DR will work.
i.e. Windup monster hits for 3000. Normally your 400 damage resist does very little and you eat 2000 (yeah their math is wierd).
Instead your item reduces damage to like 750, then your 400 DR reduces to 300ish.
And make sure you dont bring a weapon of the same color as a dungeon.
@joe1512, I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with this one! I love games that are grindy (ergo, the very first word of the review!), but I know they aren't for everyone. I also really dug the difficulty differences in the monsters, as well as playing with different combinations of loot and skills to defeat some of the harder levels, but I can see how that might not be someone else's cup of tea.
There are so many great games here, I'm sure you'll find something you like!
There has been an update, and it made gameplay a lot more interesting. Golems now have a max of 10 hit points and there are multiple ways to kill them early. Sundering their armor (weapon or armor must have "enfeeble" skill), poison (weapon or armor must have "virulent" skill), having a weapon or armor with "suffocate" skill, and I'm sure there are more. The downside is the shield that you could raise every other turn now has a cooldown of 4 turns. It sucks, but if you know what attacks to look out for, it's not horrible. There are other cool things about the update, but it would take too long to list them all. Just play the game ;)
Anyway, there are two wikis that I know of for this game, each has things set up a little differently, both are works in progress, especially since the update. Just google finders keep wiki. That will lead you to one of them, and just take the dash out of the name of that one to get to the other (best I can do without dropping an actual link, which is frowned upon here).
Update