Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers Review: Hello New Addiction

Let's get it out of the way, the reason we went for this game was because of our addiction to Balatro, another roguelike card game that was based on poker. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is based on blackjack and can be pretty addictive for a game that looks like it was made for early CRT monitors. Oh, and that name, that's too silly a name. What keeps us playing? Let's get started.

Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers has you take on an establishment and the fun and strange characters
inside like games of old on PC. And, we mean, way old. This game looks like it was made in the early 90's. It wasn't, but the pixel art is charming. It plays super easy for today's standards too. So, a modern, old-school looking game.

You play through a series of battles in poker, but your cards and the cards you get along the way have special power-ups...sadly so does your enemies/other patrons. You'll try to get the best strategy of hitting 21 without going over with the cards your dealt and that's where the frustrating fun begins.

You'll earn different cards per run, but sadly, you'll start at the bottom/tavern each time. Not the happiest about that, it can get annoying not to be able to skip to a certain spot, but that's roguelikes for you...at least ones that don't seem concerned with story. You at least get somewhat farther in Inscryption.

 

In any case, we've only cracked the surface or the basement as you can choose to go up or down after beating the first floor. Going down has you dealing with more old school game enemies like rats and witches and of course, teachers. 

Beating them (arrrgh, teachers) requires a mix of luck and strategy from strange cards and special chips that give you special power or MP points to use your more powerful cards. Like a card that can fire batarangs (not official) or scratching at their hit points. There's a wide variety of different cards that hurt not only your opponent, but you.

We see a lot of effort was put in and the game has a lot of potential, but we could see a lot of it could have been changed to be something even better and it does have patches here and there.

It's something we could see getting lost in if we ever put down Balatro, which has no story or characters, minus a Joker that taunts you. This one takes a bit more effort to get into and learn what works. But we could easily see it taking up too much of our time. This game has a much more sillier tone to the other roguelike card games out there and for that we recommend you try it. 

Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is out now on Steam

Game provided by publisher for review purposes.