Thank you Noizoo for sending us this game to review!

Owls were the guardians of knowledge until Eradicus stole all of it from the great library.  Now all of the books in the country are blank and their contents are scattered in various dungeons.  Ferocious and ignorant monsters guard this knowledge and in order to retrieve it, the hero must be both brave and intelligent.  That’s why the great council has selected you as their champion.   

Dungenious isn’t your typical hack and slash RPG.  It’s a 2D flashcard learning RPG where you attack monsters by correctly answering multiple choice questions within the time limit.  Failure to answer correctly will result in the main hero getting attacked and losing one health heart.  There’s a lot of variety when it comes to attacks, enemy types, and even the topics to study.  This game comes with fifty learning topics including math, foreign languages, geography, nature, and the ability to create your own questions.  

I like how this game has both a male or female character to play as.  While there are fifty learning topics, they have to be downloaded to your phone or tablet before you can play them.  Once installed, they are available for offline play.  Some of the topics use both audio and visual media for learning.  For example, my son was learning Morse code by hearing and seeing the code for each letter of the alphabet. 

In the beginning, the red owl enemies will teach you the topic you’re learning before they quiz/attack you on it.  In other words, prior knowledge of it is helpful, but not required.  The rest of the enemies will just quiz you on answers that you should already be familiar with.  Many levels have treasure chests and in order to open them, you’ll have to match up several questions with their correct answer.  The treasure chests will let you choose bonuses like additional health, question helps, or new attacks.

The additional health heart comes in handy, but will quickly get depleted if you find yourself surrounded by enemies.  There are various magic spells that you can learn to replenish your health or to attack monsters with fire or ice based spells.  Some of the abilities will help with the question process by removing half the answers, or stopping the timer.  In order to use any ability, you have to first earn genius points by correctly answering questions.  

The enemies get harder as you advance through the dungeon.  Some of them can move multiple times on their turn or erode away the answers making it more difficult to read them.  After several completed floors is a boss class enemy that’s stronger than the monsters that preceded it.  In the event of your character’s demise, the knowledge collected will be recorded, but they will have to restart from the beginning of the dungeon the next time around.     

Dungenious is as challenging as it is fun.  This is by far one of the most entertaining ways that I have brushed up on my Spanish.  It’s also great to see my kids learn new things like Braille while playing a video game.  The violence in this game is minimal and when the main character gets attacked you just see some slashes\scratches on the screen.  There is some fantasy elemental magic that is usable by the player and certain enemies.

Graphically, Dungeonious isn’t cutting edge, but it looks nice.  It ran perfectly fine on my tablet which is a couple of years old.   Many of the topics like art and nature require recognizing pictures of paintings or animals/dinosaurs to answer the questions correctly.  The pictures looked nice and of good quality.

The background music was ominous and fitting for exploring creepy dungeons.    Some of the topics like Morse code use audio samples as well as visual flash cards which is cool.  The spell sound effects sounded decent too.

In the end, Dungeonious is a great learning tool that provides a learning experience that is enjoyable.  The asking price of $2.99 is very reasonable, and the ability to add your own content via quizlet is awesome.  For any homeschooler or student who needs help studying, we recommend checking out Dungenious which makes homework fun.