(This review is satirical. It is mostly meant for humor. Although, once I stop misspelling “meant”, this review also shows my view on the game. So take it to bed and think about it.)

Alright, so there’s actually a story behind this one. I got bored playing ESO (Might make a review later), and I thought it would be a good idea to see what games were available for Xbox Gold members. It’s there, where I saw this game in all of its naked glory! Unbeknownst to me, what it’s naked body entailed was a very fitting 2 star rating and 2 hours of my life wasted.

Super Dungeon Bros is 1 of the 3 games available for Xbox Gold members at the time this review was written. It’s an online 4-player dungeon crawler with a top down perspective made by React Games. The plotline? There isn’t one to be found. The game drops you in on a tutorial, tells you how to play, and that’s it. From what I’ve played, I can probably fix that though.

A metal band consisting of 4 knights were going on tour, where only a total of 6 people would be seeing them. One day, their tour bus got lost in *insert place pronoun here* somehow, and the only way they can get out is if they are mystically transported to a dungeon by a disembodied voice. Loe and behold, they are lucky enough to be transported into a dungeon by a very bored voice who I can only call him the Dungeon Announcer.

Now, I can discuss the fact that the first 10 minutes of you playing the game is spent waiting for the Title Screen to load. This then leads to the spiral of horrible loading times. A lot of games have ways to fix this, like showing a model of an enemy, or giving you a little mini game for you to play. This one gives you a whole one picture to look at while playing a song that sounds like heavy metal elevator music. Now, the thing about elevator music, is that it’s supposed to be soothing, and something that you can listen to while you wait. You can’t do this with heavy metal! It gets annoying after the first minute of load time!

Once the game actually loaded, the first thing I notice was what I was listening to. I’ll give you three seconds to guess what it was.
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You probably guessed it correctly! It was the same heavy metal song from the title screen! At this point, I knew I had to learn to cope with it, as I would probably be hearing it a lot. So, bobbing my head to the beat, I selected quick play and tried to get started. Of course, this being an online game, you need people to play with. The lobby wasn’t really that bad, except the load times were horrible, once again! Like a persistent raccoon biting my buttox, I had to sit through the loading, bobbing my head shamefully to the beat.

After another 5 minutes of loading, my neck was sore and the team of me and 3 other random people were finally ready to pick our characters. Problem #2 was starting to show, and that’s the fact the characters have no variety at all. They all look the same, except for the color of their armor and other cosmetics you can apparently obtain through means unbeknownst to me and most of the internet. Although, they each have a different personality, each being stereotypical. The blue knight is your stereotypical American, the green knight is your stereotypical European with a british accent, and the red knight is your stereotypical chaotic british person. I have no idea what personality the yellow knight has because nobody bothered to pick him, and that makes me honestly wonder what horrid, disturbing personality he has.

You can also download a free DLC that gives you 4 more characters to play around with, this time they’re all female. I only downloaded the DLC because the characters that were shown all looked different from one another. There’s an orange girl, purple girl, pink girl, and cyan girl. All of these characters have much varying personalities than the knights. The purple girl sounds like your stereotypical goth girl, the cyan girl sounds like your typical snooty girl, the pink girl is a crazy cat lady, and the orange girl sounds and looks like a boogie-loving girl from the 80’s era. Now, the orange girl is my favorite for two reasons. First, it reminds me of the Austin Powers series, and I could make multiple references to that while I killed enemies. Second, when I died one time, she made a remark about how she thought she sold her pancreas. I’m ashamed to admit that this actually got me to laugh.
Now, what’s a dungeon crawler without weapons! The answer, this game. React Games advertised that there would be lots of varying weapons that you could choose from. How you get those weapons, I have no idea, and once again the internet has failed to inform me. You start off with 2 weapons to choose from, a sword and a crossbow. I will talk about the latter first. It sucks, don’t use it, and much like the year 2016, don’t even acknowledge it. The crossbow, while advertised to deal considerably more damage than the sword, it does the same amount of damage. That’s not the best part though. It has 12 rounds in it, and you have to do a 2 second reload when you’re out of ammo. Now, the thing about dungeon crawlers is that they’re supposed to be fast paced, action filled fun. That’s kinda hard to achieve when you’re running around reloading your crossbow every 3 seconds! Moving on to the sword, it’s the only weapon you should be using. You get much more defence for no cost at all. The choice between the two is like bringing either a ruler stick or a marshmallow shooter to a fight. While the marshmallow shooter would be fun to poke the bear with, it won’t protect you when the bear awakens and you’ve ran out of marshmallows in the chamber.

After scrolling through my phone for 7 more minutes in hell, I’m finally thrown into the game. At first, it seems all hunky dory, but that all changes when you try to attack. React Games thought it would be a good idea that, when you attack, your character stops moving. In dungeon crawlers-especially ones that spawn large hordes of enemies-the last thing you want to do is sit down and smell the roses, nibbling the grass off the side of the road. When attacking, you’re inhaling the entire rose bush and stuffing grass, weeds, and dirt into your pie hole.
Another problem is the fact that you have to do platforming in an isometric view. It’s kinda hard to do that when either A, a wall is blocking your vision; or B, you can’t see where your character is going to land. Kinda hard to progress through a dungeon when you keep doing the Time Warp off a cliff… again.

After 5 failed bungee attempts later, we finally make it to the boss. At that moment, past me thought that maybe, just maybe there would be a diamond in the rough chunk that is this game. Also at that exact moment, my controller disconnected. I plug my controller back in, just to see a notification saying “You have been logged out of your profile. We’re returning you to the title screen.” It surely delivered, promptly returning me to the ACTUAL TITLE SCREEN! I had to go through the long load times, the horrible connections, the whole shebang. While listening to the repetitive metal music once more, I dearly wished to pour sriracha sauce into my eyes.
12 minutes of loading time, 15 minutes of attacking while standing still, and 3 quandaries of using the aforementioned sriracha sauce later, I finally reach up to the boss fight once again. I can finally see what the boss is. The boss is hard, but not the enjoyable type of hard, more like the “I wanna pour sriracha sauce in my eyes” hard. The boss of the dungeon will spawn 3 circles of spikes that damage you and they last for 3 seconds. While this isn’t exactly hard in itself, it’s certainly hard when you have lots of eye monsters that shoot a lot of eye lazers. What was once a mediocre dungeon-crawler turned into an even worse bullet hell. React Games doesn’t really know what they wanted this game to be. At one moment it’s a dungeon-crawler, then it’s a platformer, finally it’s a bullet hell. All of these game genres have 1 big problem, though. YOU CAN’T HAVE YOUR ATTACKING SYSTEM MAKE YOU STAND STILL! All of those game types are based around movement, whether it’s for dodging, strategizing, or just making progress. They are a tad bit hard if you don’t have the ability to move.

After 5 minutes of fighting, we killed the boss. Our reward? Gems that were never mentioned anywhere before this point, and a one-way ticket out of my personal hell. There was no more gameplay after that point. Before the game could play its horrid music again, I closed the game, deleted it from my console, and never gave a second look.

My verdict of this game? Never get it. Sure, for an entire month it’s free, but still don’t grab it. You’re probably not going to get any fun out of loading screens and many, many disconnections that also lead to loading screens. This game may be complete, but it’s not polished. It probably won’t get polished. I don’t usually give out scores, but I would change the 2 out of 5 stars to a 0 out of 5 stars and a 2 out of 0 hours I should’ve given this game.