Dungeon crawler games are nothing new. We’ve been seeing them forever, and there’s really no chance that they’ll be going away any time soon. Harkening back to the gameplay of old tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, these games force us through mysterious and usually uncharted caverns and corridors, expecting us to explore and slay whatever monsters we may find. Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, on the other hand, takes a different approach to get you in on the whole general contractor aspect of actually building the dungeon.

When you start a game of Dungeon Maker, you’ll be placed into a town with an adjacent rubble field. That pile of debris, you’ll soon learn, is where you intend to build a dungeon. Building dungeons attracts monsters of all sorts, so this should be your path to great heroics and wild riches. That is, if you can stick with it for long enough to reap the rewards.

The first thing you’ll do is explore the small town and get to meet its residents. There are essentially a couple of shops, a castle, and your house. You can eventually buy things like magic spells, healing potions, weapons, food and more. In your house, you can store items, and rest to recover HP. You’ll also have the opportunity after your daily dungeon building outings to consume your daily meal, which consists of wonderful morsels like bat stew. Your daily meal is the ticket to increasing HP, strength and the like, so be sure not to skip it.

Enough with the town tedium, though – let’s get underground and start building our dungeon already! You’ll start off with a small number of simple pieces in order to add a few corridors to your humble new chamber. Building more complex mazes reaching further from the entrance hall spawns a higher number and variety of monsters. You’ll get tips from a mysterious old man the whole way through, and be sure to heed his advice for the most effective dungeon structure. Twists and turns are a must, but so is adding rooms and redecorating them. Certain monsters will only spawn near a room with water, and building a treasure room will invite hording baddies to stow their goods in your digs – only for you to slay them and steal their key, of course.

In theory, it’s a really cool concept. I never figured I would be the type of gamer to get hooked on trying to create the winding and elaborate corridors needed to lure in more monsters, but I was pretty much hooked right away with this game. The biggest problem here is that the game essentially forces you to become addicted if you are to enjoy it. The pace, especially of acquiring items and money early in the game, is extremely slow. You’ll have to play over and over and over again in the same layout just to be able to earn enough to expand. Once you do, you’ll be forced to play over and over and over again in order to find the right monster that just happens to randomly drop a necessary quest item. It’s extremely tedious and a completely artificial way to enhance the difficulty and playtime of the game.

Eventually, you’ll be able to add more elaborate rooms like courtyards and chapels, and even expand your dungeon downward to about 10 floors deep. Crazier things happen as you get further down, but the story won’t really inspire you to want to know why. Many of the missions are as simple as: “Someone said they wanted something. Go kill monsters until one drops it.” The rest of the story isn’t much better. There’s a mysterious princess and over-sexual witches, a flamboyant museum curator and more, none of whom serve to add anything more than a cool character sketch to the overall game.

The art style, especially in the character design and overworld, is very cool. It’s a decidedly anime motif with some classical touches thrown in. Inside the dungeon, however, things get a little ugly. It’s hard to distinguish certain enemy types from one another down here, although it won’t matter much to your fighting strategy. The occasional boss monsters, on the other hand, are very cool looking, due in part to their being so much larger than anything else.

The music is also a little lackluster. There are minimal effects and no voice acting, so I’ve got to base my audio judgment almost exclusively on these very dated sounding MIDI tracks. It’s interesting that there are so many styles presented in the soundscape, and it works especially well in the town area. When you’re actually in the gameplay, though, things loop a little too frequently to be really entertaining – but that fits pretty well with the rest of the gameplay.

The PSP platform doesn’t exactly offer a slew of exclusive opportunities for developers to implement special features, but DM:HG doesn’t even take full advantage of what is there. You can share your mazes with your friends, but only over an ad-hoc connection. It’s a total bummer that you can’t download internet mazes to try out with this game. If you do want to share, you’ll have to be in close range of another friend with this game. It’s worth noting that the PSP’s usually long load times seem to be almost completely absent from this game. At the very least, you’ll suffer a lot less than you could have when you’re continually going in and out and back in and back out of your dungeon.

If it wasn’t for the forced pace of this game or the completely random monster spawns getting in the way of the need for intelligent and well thought out design, I’d have an easier time recommending this game. Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground is technically very solid, with a well implemented control scheme and good enough graphics and sound, but the tedium of doing nothing more than grinding through the exact same thing over and over again really kills it. I’ll still be playing it for a while, but I wouldn’t expect this one to be a surprise commercial success. Hopefully we’ll see a sequel with more intelligent integration of the good ideas found in this game.