Soda Dungeon 2 | Now with more Resource Management

"Soda Dungeon 2 is a Idle Dungeon Crawler created by AN Productions and Poxpower and distributed by Armor Games. It is available on Steam, Android, and IOS"

In a turn of events that surprised everyone AN Productions has released a sequel for the original Soda Dungeon (published around 2015). It's not often that mobile games recieve the series treatment. Along with an art upgrade Soda Dungeon 2 manages to add some interesting features that help deal with the engagement issue which tends to be a problem for all idle games. Soda Dungeon 2 manages to continue with its original formula but a fresh coat of paint and some extra systems help bring the concept to life.

What They Added

In the first Soda Dungeon, the tavern area was incredible sparse. With the picturesque dungeon in the forefront and the madcap architecture of the local dungeon in the far off distance. In the sequel you can upgrade things beyond the tavern namely an entire town. Through a combination of grinding and resource collection you can build a carpenter shop, blacksmith, stables and other buildings which grant you new upgrades and crafting options. On the same note the amount of drops has dramatically increased from the basic coin and essence drops of the original game. Now such myriad items such as butter, broken glass, and demon fangs are harvested from fallen foes allowing you to craft weapons and armor not available from the dungeon. Another new aspect is the Letter and Quest system with the letters allowing for a fun, (albeit), minimal amount of storytelling and the quest system helping break up the monotony of the grind. One of the most interesting additions to the game is the ability to create "soda scripts" which are essentially scratch style conditional programs for how you want your characters to fight in auto combat. You can create multiple scripts and toggle which character you wish to perform the actions allowing for a surprising amount of flexibility in the fighting A.I

On top of these new systems there are a variety of changes. New Hero Types, (conscripts are replaced with townspeople such as carpenters and miners), New Enemies, a new floor plan for the dungeon, and a completely different set of dungeon bosses. The Relics are also different with a new type of relic and with Class Relics hidden behind a class leveling system.

What's the Same

Despite the additions the base gameplay is the same: Recruiting adventures in a tavern grinding through hundreds of levels of monsters and then beating up the final dungeon boss before pulling a Quinn Mallory and yeeting over to the next alternate universe. Besides the base formula the majority of the game has had a face lift so let's get onto the final analysis.

What's Better and Worse

One thing that is immediately noticeable is the art upgrade, AN Productions and PoxPower have had almost 5 years to improve on their art style. While maintaining its sendup of the retro 16-bit art style the game has an amazing amount of detail in the U.I, Character Design, Background Art, and Animation. With the inclusion of the quest and letter mechanics there is a much more robust narrative which is refreshing in an otherwise "Press button, get bigger number" genre. The gameplay is much more robust and overall the game has better engagement helping solve one of the biggest issues in idle games the switch off between idle and anti-idle gameplay. 

That being said the more intricate mechanics are both a blessing and a curse. While I enjoy the added complexity of the resource management, the procurement of said items is less then intuitive. For example if I wanted to create a sword with a certain item I would either have to wait until it dropped during the normal gameplay or brute force search through the bestiary for the one creature that drops the item and then continuously start the party on the generally area it spawns maybe killing 1-3 iterations of the monsters. Rinse and repeat. There also isn't a organic way to go about the upgrade trees. Which can be fine for some players but for others can make one feel a bit lost in how to spend ones ill gotten lucre. The last issue is that while the town system provides a lot more engagement to the game the main gameplay suffers from the same issue of diminishing returns. Essentially once you've played the first 100 levels there really is no sense of discovery with the "new" content only appearing at the end of the iteration. In the original game there where side dungeons and "shiny" type enemies,(i.e a fiend who normally carried a pitchfork was holding marshmallow stuff like that), which are not present in the sequel. 

Conclusion

Soda Dungeon 2 is an absolutely beautiful revamping of a formula that is still unique in the idle genre today. An upgraded scope, charming narrative, and a robust crafting/upgrade system provide a enjoyable ride for lovers of the original game. That being said Soda Dungeon 2 still deals with some of the grind issues of the first game but manages to relieve it with a well constructed idle strategy. Soda Dungeon 2 is a sequel is a game that we didn't know we needed but ultimately enjoy.