[Review] Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager - Nintendo Switch

Developed and Published By: Goblinz Studios
Categories: Roguelite, Dungeon Manager
Release Date: 04.29.21

Legend of Keepers changes up the standard when it comes to games. In most roguelites you will play as the hero, going deeper and deeper into wherever you need to go. However, what we have here is the exact opposite. This is a roguelite where your goal is to keep those heroes and adventurers out!

Traps, monsters, magic spells, and the dungeon keeper themselves. All in an effort to keep those pests away. Good sprites, lots of monsters, traps, “enemies” to see. There’s variety for days. You can outright kill, or instead scare them away, with attacks lowering one or both of those stats. Traps and attacks can also leave status effects such as causing tiredness, which lowers their damage dealt.

Upon winning, you go into another week. You see, Legend of Keepers isn’t just killing stupid invaders, it’s also a game of keeping your workers well off. There’s the typical leveling up of monsters and traps, but then you can also have them go business missions, therapy, just giving them a day off even for morale. There’s even events to go into where you can find meat to feed your team, get an offer from a witch, maybe even get extorted. After a few more weeks of those, it’s back to fighting.

So I would go into greater detail with Legend of Keepers, but alas, after maybe an hour of playing, I’d get crashes. Not a big deal if it’s at a particular moment, like inside of a fight or menu. However, crashes would soon happen immediately as soon as I start a fight. Why is this an issue? Legend of Keepers has autosave and upon loading my game back up? It crashes immediately.

Legend of Keepers is broken. I can’t proceed with the game. It’s disappointing because it’s such a great concept, but the game literally will not let me play it. At the time of writing the review, this game will only let me go as far as it will before crashing, usually a half an hour or so at a time. If the game gets fixed, I’d very much be willing to play it more and give it a second look.