Curse of the Dungeon Engine Review

Fifty Floors Deep in a Voxel Dungeon, With No Reviews to Vouch for It Yet

Curse of the Dungeon Engine is a $4.99 first-person voxel-style dungeon crawler that fuses looter-shooter loot systems with hack-and-slash melee combat, built around a stated 150-floor main campaign, 8-plus playable classes, and 40-plus unique Legendary Items. It entered Early Access on July 16, 2026 from solo developer Ed Rethardo, and has already received eight separate patches in its first two weeks — but, as of this writing, zero written Steam reviews, leaving the store page and screenshots as the only evidence of how the loop actually plays out floor by floor.

Three Weapon Types, One Person Building All of Them

The store page's feature list is short but pointed: three major weapon types (hitscan, projectile, and melee), voxel graphics, and procedural level generation, all credited to a single developer working alone under both the "Ed Rethardo" developer and publisher tags. That's an ambitious scope for a solo project — juggling three distinct combat systems well enough that none of them feels like an afterthought is a real design challenge — and the screenshots showing a sword-like melee light source, a hitscan-style Shock Bolt ability on the hotbar, and turret-deployment as a fourth skill slot suggest all three approaches are represented in the actual moment-to-moment kit rather than just on paper.

Fights That Fill a Corridor With Swarming Cube Enemies

One screenshot from Floor 48 shows the kind of encounter density this game leans on: a tight voxel corridor packed with roughly nine small purple-and-red cube-legged turret enemies clustered together, with a taller, glowing green wraith wielding a gun looming behind them. That's a meaningfully different combat shape than a typical one-enemy-at-a-time dungeon crawler — it reads as closer to a wave-based looter shooter, where crowd control and area coverage matter as much as single-target damage, which tracks with "Looter Shooter" and "Hack and Slash" both appearing among the Steam tags.

A Skill Bar That's Doing More Than Basic Attacks

Across all three screenshots, the same four-slot skill hotbar sits at the bottom of the screen, showing icons for what look like a chain-lightning ability, an area cone attack, a Shock Bolt projectile, and a turret-deployment skill with its own "1.8s" cooldown timer. Paired with a "Potion: 3s" cooldown readout that drops to "Potion: 0s" once exhausted in a later screenshot, the game is clearly tracking multiple simultaneous resource timers rather than relying on a single mana bar, giving combat a bit more of an ability-rotation feel than the "shoot the gun, swing the sword" framing of the store page's short description alone would suggest.

Curses, Void Plates, and Block Prompts Point to Real Mechanical Depth

Beyond straightforward combat, the screenshots hint at a handful of specific systems worth calling out: a glowing "Void Plate" interact prompt suggesting environmental puzzle or trap elements built into the floor layouts, a manual "Ctrl: Block" prompt implying melee isn't purely aim-and-swing but includes an active defensive option, and a red "CURSE!" status-effect callout that presumably ties into the game's title and framing around an ancient, malevolent "Dungeon Engine." None of that is explained in the store page's sparse description, but taken together it paints a picture of a combat system with more moving parts than a barebones procedural shooter, even if the writing and lore delivery remain thin so far.

An Ally Chat Log Suggests Co-op Is a First-Class Citizen

A scrolling combat log in the corner of multiple screenshots shows lines like "Ally: Help!," "Ally: I'm hurt...," "Ally: Take that!," and even a "Boss: DIE!" and mysterious "???: RISE!" — strongly suggesting these screenshots were captured during co-op sessions with either real allies or AI-controlled companions calling out their status in real time. Combined with the store page's explicit mention of both couch co-op and network multiplayer, that reinforces "Co-op," "Local Co-Op," and "Multiplayer" as more than box-ticking tag choices; this looks like a game designed from the outset to be played and survived as a group rather than purely solo.

Rapid Post-Launch Patching Is a Good Early Sign

Eight patches in the roughly two weeks following the July 16 Early Access launch — including specific fixes like toning down overly aggressive AI and correcting melee weapon "stubbiness," plus a later addition letting melee weapons be thrown by tapping the attack button — points to a developer actively iterating in direct response to what's presumably early player feedback, even in the absence of any public written reviews. For a solo-developed Early Access title, that kind of visible, rapid patch cadence in the opening weeks is a meaningfully positive signal about ongoing support, even if it can't yet substitute for actual outside opinions on how the game feels to play.

Verdict

Curse of the Dungeon Engine pairs an ambitious, three-weapon-type combat system with a swarm-heavy, co-op-friendly voxel dungeon crawl, all built solo and backed by an unusually fast opening patch cadence — eight updates in two weeks is a strong show of commitment for a $4.99 Early Access release. The screenshots suggest more mechanical depth than the sparse store description lets on, from resource-timer juggling to environmental interact prompts to status-effect curses, but with zero reviews on record, there's no outside confirmation yet of how well 150 floors of procedural generation actually holds together over a long run, or how the hitscan, projectile, and melee weapon types balance against each other in practice. At this price, with this much stated scope, it's a reasonable speculative pickup for looter-shooter and dungeon-crawler fans willing to help shape an Early Access title early — just go in knowing you'd be one of its very first public voices.