Dungeon of the Endless: Apogee review

Dungeon of the Endless is one of my all-time favorite games, and I'm glad it's back on the App Store as Dungeon of the Endless: Apogee. This game's unique blend of genres, near limitless replayability, haunting atmosphere, and unforgiving nature draws me in time and time again as I try to master every dark corner of it. As a game that's seven years old now, I don't plan on re-litigating its finer points. You'll just have to trust me, or better yet, read our review of the original iOS version. All of the stuff mentioned there is still true of Apogee, but this newer version brings some welcome new content and a lot of unwelcome technical problems.

Expanded endlessness

Dungeon of the Endless: Apogee is the most complete version of Dungeon of the Endless you can buy. It comes with five DLCs that give you tons of new characters, modules, ships, and enemies to play around with on top of the base game. From the jump, almost all of add-on content is unlocked straight away, so you can start playing with it without worrying about a grind. The only exception is one of the unlockable ships, which is basically the ultra hard mode of the game, anyway.

All of the added content gives more shape and variety to a game that already had plenty of it. No new characters, enemies, items, or ships fundamentally change the base game, but they're nice to have, and can give long-time players of the base game some additional variability to sink their teeth into, which is nice.

Touchy touchup

If it weren't for the add-ons available in Dungeon of the Endless: Apogee, I'd be pretty disappointed by it. Aside from the widescreen support, it feels like a worse version of the previous mobile release of Dungeon of the Endless, thanks mostly to a variety of technical problems.

The most noticeable of these issues is an audio bug you can reliably recreate just by locking your screen while playing the game. Doing so makes certain sound effects unbelievably loud and distorted when you resume play. There's also a problem with the game's menus in that they unpause the game whenever you close them, which is a pretty big problem for a game that largely revolves around keeping the game paused as you plot your next moves!

If it ain't broke

Bugs aside, Dungeon of the Endless: Apogee also has an overhauled control scheme that largely just doesn't work as well as the original iOS version's. This isn't some preference thing, either. There are controls in this game that just don't seem to work, or--if they do--the game doesn't explain how to do them at all.

Playing the previous mobile version of Dungeon of the Endless I never found myself accidentally moving characters, and in Apogee it happens all the time. These control problems aren't game-breaking, but in a tight run where every resource matters, it's shockingly easy to move an operator away from their module just by zooming in from the map the wrong way.

The bottom line

If it weren't for my deep reverence of Dungeon of the Endless, I'd dismiss Apogee outright. This release is buggy and has some pretty significant control problems. That said, I've fought my way through several clears and can't wait to do more, because at its core Dungeon of the Endless is still an incredible game.