Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch is an interesting beast. Part deck builder, part tower defense and part dungeon management, this is a game of so many gears I’m unsure if they all make the machine run smoother or jam up the mechanisms.
The basic mechanics of Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch are explained well enough. Heroes are coming to invade your dungeon, and you must slaughter them using a mix of summoned demons, magic spells, and even jumping into the fray yourself. Each round has a set number of enemies, and using your limited mana and “population” cap, you must render them dead and buried. Every four waves you can buy more units, keep going until the round is over.
Each creature belongs to at least one faction, which reminds me of a similar system to the Monster Train games. Each faction has their own mechanics and buffs, and the more you specialise in a single faction, the more their benefits help you. Unlike Monster Train, you do not pick a faction before you start. Instead, your entire loadout is supposed to organically grow as you work through the game.
I’ve mainly been playing the Story mode, and your dungeon layout, including units placed, persists between rounds. Once a round is cleared, you jump back into the main hub to talk to people, learn more story details, and upgrade your dungeon (whether through buying and building various structures on the dungeon floorplan, or enhancing your “synergies” with the factions). Each of these mechanics get a very bare bones explanation, but it’s up to you how much you dig in and try and figure out how everything works.
Due to this, I’ve spent most of my playtime feeling a little lost. Every nougat of information that I’ve gleaned has felt useful, but I’m constantly hounded by a feeling that I really don’t know what I’m actually doing. There’s a fine balance to be struck between hand holding and chucking you in the deep end to see if you sink or swim, and I think Vambrace leans far too heaving on the latter philosophy.
I’ve spent several hours with it, and still don’t really know what any of the factions do, despite reading all the available tooltips, and when the first boss came he summarily handed my arse to me on a platter. I can’t quite decide if this was an intended (and clumsy) difficulty spike, or if I’m missing something obvious here, but either way I had to bash my head against the metaphorical wall for quite a while before I limped through victorious. Limped is also the operative word here, because of the persistent status of your dungeon I was thrown into the next fight severely outgunned.
The main ways of maintaining units is either to recruit (at the start of a round, or at the 4/8/12th wave of combat) or to torture and make enemies obey you. But of course, this requires having forces available to make it to these recruiting waves, or weaken enemies enough to capture and send to the dungeon.
The art style is absolutely gorgeous, and sound design is effective, creating a gothic fantasy atmosphere that bleeds through an interesting story. Though calling your main character M5 in a fantasy story just feels incredibly jarring. However, there is a good incentive to talk to every character between rounds and really learn exactly what’s going off in this world.
Dvora Studio have cooked up an interesting package here, but without a more thorough guide, I feel the depths may elude me further.
Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch was reviewed on Xbox Series X, but is also available on Playstation 5 and Steam.
