I didn't exactly know that Soda Dungeon was going to be an idle game and I was pleasantly surprised when I hit the sweet spot of the gameplay loop. You hire adventurers to run through a dungeon, get gold and items in order to make the next batch of adventurers go further while allowing you to buy upgrades for your tavern and unlock new classes as you go. Then after a while you reset the game and start over with some bonuses. You can manually control the battles, but otherwise, everything is automated. It's a great game and I can't wait to continue playing it.

At the start of the game, you have only one class and you both need to buy sodas and have enough reputation to attract more advanced heroes. Reputation is earned by buying decoration and some upgrades for your bar, these upgrades range from having more room for potential adventurers, an armory and some VIP upgrades like keeping gold when you reset, faster dungeon runs, or lower costs to hire your guys. Then you send your team through a dungeon, fighting wave after wave of enemies, encountering bosses each 5 and 10 level. When you have a team of five guys, you get back attacks and the characters get skills and special item bonuses so there's depth there.

Having the game fight it out automatically is more or less the best part but some of the decisions it makes are questionable. The game auto-picks the best gear for your characters when they leave the tavern, but sometimes it'll put magic attack raising items on pure melee fighters with no magic skills, sometimes it won't add MP recovery items and select shields that lower your attack considerably for a negligible boost in defense. The auto-fight isn't perfect either, your characters will use special abilities to kill very weak enemies that normal attacks would've defeated in one shot, draining their MP before future battles. You'll run so many times through the game, however, that these shortcomings don't matter. You can tweak the gear before leaving if you really want to and as you go along you have so many options during battle that some mistakes here and there won't ruin it. Some characters also can 'Defend' during battle, but the auto-fight never uses it, weird!

You also can go through special doors at some points in dungeons and open chests - these are the only other things you do except battle, and they all get resolved automatically if you're idling - the doors seem to more or less always have traps in them, but they also can have healing fountains or chests, so you can try them from time to time. Each slice of 20 floors of the dungeon has a specific theme - with enemies using similar abilities - and each 100 floors is a repeat of the last one, but with stronger enemies and better loot. There is a nice range of special abilities on weapons, armors and accessories, combined with character powers, so you keep getting stronger and unlocking new stuff until you manage to defeat the big boss at the end of the dungeon, then reset the game and need to do it more or less all over again, with relics. Relics come in two flavors, they either boost all your characters, or give special powers to certain classes and boost them as well. You can upgrade relics with a special currency that drops from certain enemies and they're a big help in order to make further runs go faster.

Soda Dungeon is a really good game, if it didn't drain my iPad 3 battery even while plugged, I would probably have it running in the background all the time. I bought the ads-removal in-app purchase because it was quite worth it, but the rest of the microtransactions are a bit rough, no matter, this is a good idle game and time can compensate for deep pockets easily.

Posted
AuthorJérémie Tessier