You've just finished school (at the age of twelve!) and you realise that you need to get a job; unfortunately, work is hard to come by during this time of economic crisis. You originally planned on finding gainful employment at a furniture workshop, but every such establishment has turned you down because they were already employing too many 'youths'. You decide that working in the forest is the way to go but since the recent influx of monsters in the land, it's currently closed to the general public. Your last resort is to leave South Arc, the home that you love - will it really have to come to that? As you ponder your predicament, you hear a voice; you turn around and lo and behold, you see a talking magic shovel - who'd have thought it?! After a series of unconnected and strange events, you find yourself with the unenviable job of Dungeon Maker, appointed by the Mayor to attract monsters away from the forest by luring them into the dungeons that you must dig with your trusty magic shovel!

Plenty of games give you randomly generated dungeons to explore but Dungeon Maker throws in a bit of a twist to the usual DS RPG fare, as it tasks you with creating your own dungeons, for the sole purpose of attracting a range of monsters into them. Once you've managed to lure the monsters in, it's time to let the battle commence. You may remember an old game called Dungeon Keeper, which I personally love; you could say it's a dungeon-based version of Theme Hospital. There are some similarities between Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Maker, so if you've played the former then you will have already come across some aspects of the latter .

Played from a top down, isometric viewpoint, you traverse the dungeon using your shovel to knock down walls and erect a variety of rooms to attract the creatures that inhabit the forest. Dungeon Maker offers the opportunity to create unique dungeons by giving you total control over where you choose to place tunnels and chambers. Once you've created the basic maze, you can set traps in order to entice the monsters to enter. The more desirable the dungeons are, the more colourful the monsters that can be attracted, resulting in catching rarer and larger beasts [Gotta catch 'em all! Sorry. Ed]. Different rooms bring in different kinds of creatures; Slimes are attracted to trash dumps for example, whereas feed barrels tend to bring in Pigboars. Once a certain number of monsters inhabit your dungeon, the "boss" monster appears, and defeating this formidable beast reveals a ladder that leads down to a deeper dungeon, which then becomes accessible. This dungeon can then be adjusted and changed to suit the next quest that needs completing, and so on.

Designing a dungeon requires a certain level of skill and consideration to get the most out of the item-dropping aspect of the game. You can fight up to three monsters at any one time and the last monster you kill is the one that drops an item. So, it's best to make sure that you kill the strongest monster last, as these are the ones that drop the rarer items. Producing dungeons is easily manageable, but whether you will feel inclined to keep creating them is sadly another matter. The sequence you follow throughout Dungeon Maker consists of building rooms in your dungeons to attract monsters, which drop items that can be sold to buy better rooms, which tempt rarer and stronger monsters to your dungeon, which in turn drop even more expensive items, and so on. As you might imagine, this process can become something of a repetitive chore after a while.

When you've created your dungeon and it's time to head inside, your attributes are displayed on the bottom screen and the battles take place on the top screen, during which the usual magical items and powers can be employed both offensively and defensively. Items are dropped randomly after each battle; sometimes you receive cash, sometimes you find new weaponry and there are even times when beast body parts (used for your meals) are left behind. Storing your spoils is easy enough; the inventory system is simple to use and while you can only carry a certain number of items at once, you can store items at your house to retrieve when you need them.

Your character is entirely controlled using the d-pad (no stylus needed here) and the system works smoothly, with the playing area displayed on the top screen and the dungeon map available for reference below. In between quests into the depths, you can buy food, weapons and rooms for your dungeon, as well as picking up side quests from the townsfolk, who ask you to find certain items. Completing these quests increases the range of weapons, magic and items that you can buy, although some requests take too long to complete. One such example involves finding a Warcat Halter; unfortunately it took absolutely ages for a Warcat to drop this item and I was already on my fourth dungeon by the time I uncovered one. Warcats are encountered at the start but the randomly generated nature of item-dropping meant that I couldn't purchase any more new types of weapons or armour I found the accursed Warcat Halter!

You can only use your shovel a certain number of times (defined by its MP attribute) each day before you have to return home to cook your dinner and rest. This part of Dungeon Maker is played out in real time, as opposed to the turn-based nature of the battles. The shovel's shockingly low MP value at the beginning of the game makes your progress a very limited and methodical process at first. Often you don't have enough MP to generate more than two rooms, so you'd better not make a mistake, because correcting mistakes uses up MP as well! The primary method of increasing your statistics, such as Strength and Magic, is by cooking yourself certain meals. Each meal increases a particular stat; for example, Boiled Veggies increases your magic points while eating Pigboar Stew has a positive effect on both your strength and your life points. Luckily you don't have to mix the ingredients yourself, but what is available to consume depends on the ingredients you have obtained. It's a clever concept really, as you have to sometimes plan a week ahead to make the most of your stat building; you don't want to spend too many days increasing just your health points because you'll end up regretting it when you haven't allocated any meals to increase your attack strength. This way of increasing your stats is quite original and is an interesting concept; however, the novelty eventually wears off and it's likely that you just won't want to bother going home and eating over and over again, which is unfortunately something that you have to do a lot in Dungeon Maker.

Utilising the time-honoured RPG tradition of turn-based action, the combat works reasonably well to begin with, especially given that battles are not force or random - you simply walk into a monster to start a fight. However, the game soon descends into a tedious slog of battle after battle where you don't have to think about your strategy; all you end up doing is pressing the attack button until you win and then moving on to the confrontation. Only when you encounter the boss monsters do you have to try something a bit more tactical - but again, once you know what to do, even these encounters become a repetitive chore. The monsters themselves, like most of the game, are designed with a cartoony anime feel. Some of the creatures are fairly imaginative, but on the most part they're a pretty generic bunch; a Slime is just a green blob and a Pigboar looks exactly as it sounds (and it's a redundant name given that a boar is just a kind of pig). The main problem is that the monotonous battles are broken up by the constant and equally monotonous task of going home to rest and eat; rather than spicing up the gameplay, it just breaks it up into two equally tedious segments.

The story isn't particularly engrossing either and the characters aren't very memorable. The side quests offer little in the way of imagination and you'll often forget what you're meant to be finding, simply because you don't really care. The dialogue is all text-based; there is no voice acting, and while there are times when it's quite witty, especially you're talking to your magic shovel, these moments are lost in a mass of streaming text that can be infuriating during battles. If you unleash one of your special powers and there are many enemies on the screen then you sometimes get a line of text per enemy, which slows the pace of battle to a crawl. The general background ambience is standard RPG fare, light on the ears but on a non-stop loop. Each dungeon you unlock usually adds another background song, although they are all fairly similar.

As you progress you gain two partners in your quest as Dungeon Maker, a teenage girl and some kind of slime that can mimic things. Your mimic ally is actually quite the novelty addition; occurring later in the game, it copies the body parts of the monsters that you meet on your travels, so if you come across a Crowbat for example [I love these hilariously-named creatures! Amuse-Ed.] then the mimic can copy its head statistics and use them as its own. After a while you have to decide whether copying a newly acquired body part is better than the one that mimic already possesses, because some parts can wear armour whilst others are blessed with specific abilities. As a way of increasing the lifespan of the game, you can also go crawling into a friend's dungeon and vice versa, although by this point you'll probably be past the point of wanting to try someone else's dungeon because you are so tired of making so many of your own.

The creation aspect of Dungeon Maker is quite enjoyable to begin with, but the constant battles, digging and eating turn this initially fun RPG into a very tedious exercise indeed. There are some clever ideas in here, but the repetitive nature of the gameplay means that the novelty wears off long before the game is over. If you're a big fan of quirky Japanese RPGs and have plenty of free time then Dungeon Maker might just be up your subterranean alleyway, but if not then you're best off digging into something a little more engaging instead.

Reviewed by Christopher McNally for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).