Tiny Dice Dungeon Review [iOS]

Tiny Dice Dungeon is a free RPG played with dice. You play as a guy with a big sword who captures monsters Pokemon style and then uses them to beat up other monsters. There is looting and upgrading, mainly of your all important dice as well as in app purchases.

The way the game is played is you roll a bunch of dice. You start out with a small amount of dice but as you level up you get more and you can choose from different types of dice. You get to keep rolling till you choose to attack, or you roll a one. The problem with the, 'rolling a one' mechanic, is that it happens quite often on a six sided dice. Now there are different type of dice, including dice that cannot roll a one but you must always have at least one basic dice that can. It's really friggin' annoying, especially if your whole team rolls a one on their first go and this does happen often.

Items are handled really oddly in this game too, you get a whole horde of these things before you even have any idea what they do. Items could be things like a comb, or a pocket cactus and they give your characters bonuses and often negative attributes. Introducing items after you have collected a bunch only the makes the game more confusing, as now you have to go back and look through all the shit you've collected. Each character can have up to four items and because each item is so vague as to what it is and what it does, it's a pain to equip them, especially because it may negatively effect your character as much as it does benefit it.

Tiny Dice Dungeon is going for a Pokemon type monster collection but it doesn't make collecting and managing your monsters easy, nor does it have particularly interesting monsters to collect. You are very limited on the number of slots you can have for monsters for starters which is very un-Pokemon-like and it does the whole combining monsters together for better stats thing which is always irritating. It just feels like you are constantly hitting the pay-wall in this area. I am not against having pay for features but not when they complicate and confuse the whole feeling of the game.

Tiny Dice Dungeon is a good idea but it doesn't deliver. The dice mechanic is a clever one but it will never beat rolling real dice. Secondly, the game feels too clunky and out of order. Rather than keep it simple, with obvious ideas about upgrading and pay options the, game confuses you with pocket cacti and other nonsense. Finally, it doesn't have the design nor high quality art that Pokemon does and although its 8-bit style is cute it doesn't make up for its other short comings 5.9/10.

[Edit - Due to feedback from a reader I had to lower the score on this game or rewrite the review. I chose the easy option and also perhaps the correct one.]