Reviews

• Numscullery

  Dec 4, 2022

  My 7 year old son thinks this is the best game ever created!!!!
• Two Frothy Beards

  Jul 14, 2023

  This game could have been amazing. However, it has been abandoned for years now. The early access period was stated by the developers as "We will be in Early Access for roughly 6 months". Five years later the game sits gathering dust. I highly suggest you pass on purchasing this game unless you can get it for less than $3. This game is much more of a tech demo than a game. So VERY LITTLE content to justify the price.
• gamedeal user

  May 24, 2018

  Very nicely thought out mechanics and I'm definitely looking forward to playing it in the future when there's more content in the actual story.
• gamedeal user

  May 24, 2018

  I've updated my review to reflect Dungeon Brewmaster's latest patches. ============ My old review: This game has bugs abound. The in-game hands hover a foot over your actual ones, the controllers constantly vibrate, the recipes work sometimes and don't other times. Your recipe book is frequently confusing and there are many things that go unexplained that would really be of benefit to the player if they were explained. (I can't find the brown slug with eyes anywhere on, under or around the table, and thanks to this progression is impossible.) The travelling merchant sold me what looked like a new, more colorful grater but it didn't show up on the table either. Other than the multiple gameplay and technical issues, Dungeon Brewmaster is colorful, adorably stylized, and would probably be much more entertaining if the problems I mentioned were fixed. As it stands now, however, it's more or less impossible to play. ================================= My new review: First, the updates - They fixed the vibration bug! Hands are still floating in the wrong place at the time of writing, but I believe that will be fixed very soon. Also, the brown slug in the spellbook turned out to actually be the purple one on the table, so that was my fault. Also, the cosmetic upgrades to your cooking utensils go on the shelf behind you so that's also my fault. You can just swap them out with each other by grabbing it. I encountered a new bug, though, when I magically combined a purple glowing crystal and a unicorn potion. The resulting item was just another unicorn potion, but it kept respawning on the magic circle. When I slid the magic shelf back into the bar, it continued to respawn and fall to the ground to be eaten by the mimic without end. Dungeon Brewmaster in its current form is very short and still has a long way to go until it can be called finished. HOWEVER, the mechanics, character and set design, and the whole, like, general vibe, man, set this game on the right track to becoming something enjoyable. There are indeed a lot of ingredients, which is nice, but there aren't a whole lot of combinations they can make with each other which kind of defeats the purpose. The goblins that come into your bar generally want some variation on fried frog or slug, some magically combined object, or even just a raw ingredient. I found myself rarely using the cauldron in free play, if ever. It would be nice if there were a reason to take the frying pan off of the flame at any time, or if the paring knife worked on more ingredients. (I haven't tried using it to see if it'll remove the cylops' eye. If it doesn't work, it should. If it does work, then right on.) I tried making a potion of charming for the cow the first time she came in, but it just acted as if I gave her the brew that she asked for instead which was kind of disappointing. Some consequences to brewing the wrong potion would be nice. There are no penalties for messing up. (Yet?) I'd like to see some kind of in-game recipes list, sorted by how powerful they are. The ability to serve things to patrons that they didn't ask for. Someone to actually use that foosball table I spent over a hundred gold on. A date with that bloodthirsty cow! This is a great demo, but unfortunately it's still just a demo. I reccomend it, but keep in mind you won't be getting much in the way of content besides the ingredients to play around with and a ten minute story mode. Until the full game is out, I say wait for a sale.
• gamedeal user

  May 25, 2018

  Highly recommend, buy it while it's on sale! Great game to showcase what a good VR game is! Works perfectly on a windows mixed reality headset without issues. System: i5-4690, 8GB ram, GTX 1050 Ti This game has AWESOME graphics/art style!! It really catches your attention! The quirky ingredients make it interesting and fun to play. I played with friends watching and they got a kick out watching me make all sorts of quirky things. I look forward to seeing more content /game mechanics added as the early access progresses! I would love to see something to make the gameplay slightly more difficult or competitive; maybe a game mode or "endless/survival/timed" mode. But regardless it's still super fun. I've tried a variety of VR games now and this is definately one of the better games (that works extremely well with VR) and one you should have in your library; especially at this low price! Don't pass this one up!
• gamedeal user

  May 26, 2018

  UPDATED Review (January 28th, 2019): INTRODUCTION: After a couple of complaints from users about my outdated review, I've decided to revisit Dungeon Brewmaster. This is my experience. GRAPHICS: Again, upon entering the game, I am plunged into an atmospheric world of creatures--all three of them: An orc/troll hybrid, these goat creatures, and the goblin customers. I won't lie--when you start Act 1, it always wows me when the fireplace comes roaring to life. The game--visually--is quite polished, but unfortunately, that's where much of my praise ends. GAMEPLAY: This isn't Diner Duo, where you are on the clock, trying to complete multiple orders. This isn't the type of game that incentivizes your creativity, either. This game gives you the illusion of freedom by giving you the ability to transmute a variety of different ingredients together, either via the alchemy table or the frying pan--that is, when the combinations you choose don't give you poop instead. When given the chance between orders. I wanted to try my hand at some combinations, seeing as the developers claimed they've added "way more". A year later, and I am still getting poop. Is this my fault, that I just so happened to choose the "wrong combination?" Perhaps. But again, it's not like this game rewards you for being creative with your transmutations. But perhaps this game isn't about being creative. It's about completing orders. Very well, then we must dive further and look at what motivates a player to complete orders. After each order is placed on the counter, a sack of money materializes and a tentacle takes it away. In the story mode, which currently consists of Acts 1 and 2, the incentive for you to complete orders is to--primarily--further the 1 & 1/2 hour story. It's never about making money, as the tentacle animation would have you believe. During Act 1, a merchant appeared before me, offering 3 ingredients/tools of which I could only choose one. I was given a timer to choose one of the three, but I hadn't made enough money at that point to purchase any of them. Thus, I had to stand and wait until the timer ran out. Was it annoying? Yes. But maybe in the end, it would be worth it, I thought. The merchant would arrive a couple of more times throughout Acts 1 and 2, but again. What was the incentive for me to purchase these items? I purchased a different-looking grater, but that didn't send my old grater away. My old grater was hanging off the wall behind me, and now I had this new grater, which does the same thing. It didn't make my brewing more efficient, and it didn't change the attributes of my ingredients. It was just a different looking grater. I always made more money than I needed. So there goes that--if I don't need to be making that much money, and I can only ever buy one ingredient/tool at a time when the merchant arrives, the game turns into a little bit of a slog to play. Later on, I purchased a cactus plant--a new ingredient. But that would only expand the order variation by a tad. So here's what we have: If my motivation to complete orders isn't to gain money, be creative, or further the story (which does, in fact, end after Act 2), then what are my motivations? What is my motivation to play the freeplay mode? To get money to buy more stuff? I'm not certain as to the longevity of that formula, but I'm sure it wears out pretty quick. CONTROLS: Now here's where I'm going to address the controls: The controls as far as I can tell, have improved, but not by much. I've encountered a bug where I'd be able to grab the frog and toad creatures from an arms-length away and drag it around, as if performing some Blade & Sorcery telekinesis move. God forbid that you drop an ingredient on the floor, much less an ingredient that you just spent time crafting in the frying pan AND the alchemy table. If you were to drop your ingredient anywhere REMOTELY close to the monster chest below your table, you can bet that you won't be swift enough to retrieve it before the creature consumes your hard work. I've even grabbed my ingredient off the floor a couple of times, only to have the chest gobble it down from my hands. Collisions in this game are great, but they're annoying. Want to organize your workspace? I wouldn't. It's much easier to throw your ingredients/tools on the tavern floor than place them back where they belong. After all, why do that when they'll just respawn where they're supposed to be? Cutting and grating ingredients is sometimes satisfying, when your knife or grater isn't clipping through the ingredients. At the end of the day, your hands are just way too big for the ingredients you have to handle. Instead of standing for Act 2, I decided to downscale my tavern workspace to size "small" and sit in a chair. I found that grabbing objects at this scale was a much bigger improvement, though I had an immense amount of difficulty pulling the topper off of the unicorn-horned bottle. I actually recommend players play the game with the smaller worktable--not only does it decrease the chance of you grabbing the wrong ingredient, but it also prevents you from reaching beyond your VR boundary limits, if you have a small space. SOUND: The voice acting isn't great, but it's passable. The main thing about the sound that took me out of my immersion was that the voices and sounds weren't where they were supposed to be. Directional audio, if you're to play any other polished VR game, is a given. In Dungeon Brewmaster, a character would be standing in front of the table, but most of his voice could only be heard threw my left ear. This is improved in Act 2, though, where their voices are actually centered. But when characters are standing to my left or to my right, they still sound as if they're standing right in front of me. It's a bit of an issue. CONCLUSION: This was a long read. I know. But I've given it a lot of thought and I felt that I would be doing the game a disservice if I weren't to critique it honestly. Once again, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this game. There just isn't enough being offered at the table for $15. Sure, this game is in early access, and I understand that. But I think more could've been done with it given the 1-year time span I've spent away from it. Maybe it was meant to be a short experience, but it just didn't provide enough of the WOW factor and charm that comes with other short VR titles. There just isn't enough to do, and very little motivation to do any of it. I think that's what a cooking game needs. At the end of the day, if what you're going to be doing is following instructions to make these orders, you need a really good progression system to keep players engaged in what they're doing, otherwise, what they're doing will eventually become tedious. It's a shame that this is where I'm left standing with this game. Maybe I've expected too much from Dungeon Brewmaster, and maybe Dungeon Brewmaster can't give me what I want, simply because my vision isn't the developers' vision for this experience. Maybe. But here's the honest, TL;DR truth: I wanted to keep playing--but there was nothing left to see. If you want to be able to pour hours into this game, there needs to be an entire gameplay rework that rewards and incentivises play.
• gamedeal user

  May 30, 2018

  This game is gorgeous! Very fun characters and beautiful effects. Great twist on games like Job Simulator and much more creative. It's early access right now but this game has so much potential and I can't wait to see what kind of content gets added moving forward. Also... shopkeeper goblin guys is equal parts creepy and adorable. Shaking his had to complete the sale is a really nice touch!
• gamedeal user

  Sep 5, 2018

  This game is adorable, and I want to love it. However, it is riddled with bugs. I played this for my stream, and there were game breaking problems. If you're ok with that, and want something that will be fun for an hour or two, go on and get it! It's cool!!! Otherwise, lets get through the bad, before I comment on the good. Bad Stuff: -I'm not sure what's going on graphically, but my computer chugs trying to run this game. I've played a lot of other, much prettier, heavier games and have had no problems streaming it. My viewers said it looked alright, but I was experiencing some serious jittering inside the helmet. -After every act, the book opens up to blank pages. I had to quit the game completely and restart it to make another selection. -Gameplay is lacking. While I love the story stuff, there's really no meat (har har) to the game. Even in free play. It's really boring to look at a customer, go read a book and follow it step by step, and serve the customer. A lot of other cooking games have some serious time management and simpler recipes to follow. This is far more fun than what you're given here. Plus, no one seems to be upset if they are served horribly slowly (Or wrong?) There's nothing to make you go faster, nothing to encourage you to explore. I'm quite ok with simple 15 dollar games, but it needs to have repeatable fun mechanics that challenge me physically/mentally to accomplish even if it's the same basic mechanics. Please look up some other cooking games to see what they do. -Again, for 15 dollars, I want something that's fun and repeatable even if it's simple. I can name 10 or 20 games in this price range that have me coming back to them because of extremely simple mechanics that challenge me. -There are numerous graphical glitches of things disappearing/reappearing during animations. -Your frying pan needs to be a bit bigger for some of the items i'm forced to put in there, or, the purple vial needs to allow for the top to be uncorked so you can poor its contents in. In fact, that was very... unintuitive what I was suppose to do there. The mushroom bottle you uncork and pour, but the pink one you can't? The Good -I absolutely adore the story bits! Like, seriously! I love them! They're cute and I want more!!! -The atmosphere is fantastic! And I can see that there are ways to upgrade the interior looks of my tavern! That's awesome. -The components/ingredients have logical/noticeable effects. When I see an image on a customer, I almost know exactly how to achieve it without looking at the book. This is very well done!!! -I love the upgrades to my little area. However I have ecxess gold and no way to spend it other than suffering the game to see what upgrades the little minion has for me. I love the game, I want to really love this game, but it just needs more... game... to it. Right now, it's a pretty broken demo of a cool setting and that's it.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 28, 2020

  Its now October 2020 and still no updates. Sadly at this point I would call this game dead. Fun to play and follow along with the campaign, sadly with no recent update I can't recommend this game to anyone else.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 31, 2021

  Game ben dead for 3 years and they never coming back to this game to finish thier EA of a good game. Even tho they promised they would return to it. Im not giving a negative review for the game itself. Im giving a negative review for it to be unfinnished and abandoned. They said they doing a bigger project, but never told what it really is, or what they ben doing for a long time. Ive not played this game for a long time because i wanted to play it again when they added more story acts, or content in general. Sadly that never happend for a long time now. It only has 2 acts in the story mode. The infinity mode is bugged and can easly break anytime when combining or cooking items for the costumer. [strike] If they ever return to it some point of time/year. I'll reconsider changeing my review to positive. [/strike] Because of an excuse to leave the game behind for a bigger android/mobile project since 2018, it´s considerd abandoned.