Dungeon Settlers

Dungeon Settlers Review - A Brutal, Brilliant Machine With Two Years Still To Run

Colony sim upstairs, dungeon crawl downstairs

The structure is clean: you run a Guild expedition sent to destroy the dungeon at the root of the land's troubles. Above ground you build a settlement from nothing, laying out walls and doors to shape bedrooms, dining halls, a forge stocked with anvils and smelters. You farm. You research. You turn raw dungeon hauls into rations and camping supplies for the next descent.

Below ground, it's a party-based crawl, four members at a time, floors and rooms procedurally recomposed every expedition and each region throwing its own environmental effects at you. Deeper means better loot - gemstone veins, herbs, mandrake - and considerably nastier company, from towering golems to the products of magical experiments that stopped being anything recognisable a long time ago. There are dungeon merchants down there. There is an ancient tree that wants blood before it gives fruit.

The loop between the two halves is the game's real engine. Every expedition is a withdrawal against what the settlement can afford to resupply, and every building decision upstairs is a bet on how deep you think you can push.

"Hardcore strategy" is not marketing copy

CanOpener labels this a hardcore strategy game and they mean it.

Combat is real-time with pause, with no turn or round limits - you can stop the world whenever you like and think. You will need to. The toolkit runs through stun, bleed, burn, provoke, vulnerable, charge attacks, summons; enemies have readable patterns and exploitable traits, and fights that look unwinnable genuinely open up once you work out what the room is actually asking of you. It's the good version of this design: hard because it's legible, not because it's opaque.

Character building has real texture too. Six major abilities per member, dozens of combat and life stats underneath, traits drawn from race, background and personality, and skill trees along sword, mace, bow and fire magic that you're combining into a four-person party rather than picking in isolation.

And then permadeath sits under all of it, quietly making every decision heavier than it looks.

Where the 81 comes from

Three things keep this out of the top bracket, and none of them are about design quality.

Content ceiling. The Early Access build takes you through the first two dungeon regions start to finish. That's many hours - genuinely - but it's a floor, not a full building. More regions, monsters, weapons, skills, races and events are all scheduled rather than shipped.

The runway. CanOpener estimate roughly two years in Early Access, and say the price goes up at full release. That's honest, and I respect it. It also means buying today at $24.99 is buying a two-year relationship with a game that will change substantially underneath you. Modding and Steam Workshop support are planned but not here yet.

Friction. UI/UX, optimisation and balance are all on the developer's own improvement list, and it shows in the places you'd expect: managing a growing settlement gets fiddlier than it should, and the onboarding leaves you to work out a lot of interlocking systems by dying. Worth flagging too that localisation was done with generative AI, with only some languages translated or reviewed by humans - English reads fine, but if you're playing in one of the other nine, temper expectations.

It's single-player only, for what it's worth, and the minimum specs are almost comically low - this will run on nearly anything, including a Mac.

The verdict

81/100. Dungeon Settlers already has the hard part solved: the colony sim and the dungeon crawler genuinely need each other, the combat rewards thinking, and permadeath gives the whole thing weight that neither genre manages alone. What it doesn't yet have is the content and the polish to match its ambition, and the developer is upfront that both are years out.

If you like your strategy games unforgiving and your losses permanent, this is an easy recommendation even now. If you want the finished article, wishlist it and check back - it'll be a better game and a more expensive one.