Dungeon Settlers is a real-time strategy RPG/colony management simulator set in a ruined world. Read our review of its early-access build to see what it did well, what it didn’t, and whether it’s worth trying.
Everything We Know About Dungeon Settlers
Dungeon Settlers Story
Dungeon Settlers follows the story of an expedition party trying to reach the bottom of a dangerous dungeon, which houses the source of the corruption currently taking over a desolate world.
As the expedition is met with new challenges, floors, and enemies, its ranks also grow with new faces and members, all offering their swords and spells to the revitalization of the world and the destruction of the dungeon core.
Dungeon Settlers Gameplay
Dungeon Settlers’ gameplay builds around the game’s real-time combat system, which requires players to strategize their skill activations, basic attacks, and positioning in real time. The game promotes a tactical pause screen, which lets players lay out their commands to each party member to enact once combat resumes.
This extends to the game’s colony management layer, which is only accessible when the party is not currently in a dungeon expedition. Featuring multiple building mechanics such as efficiency, average quality scores, room sizes, room decoration points, and multiple tiers of materials, Dungeon Settlers has players weighing the pros and cons of maintaining a thriving colony amidst the ever-encroaching threat of the dungeon.
Dungeon Settlers Release Date and Time
Released in Early Access on September 4, 2026
Dungeon Settlers was released in Early Access on September 4, 2026, at 4:00 A.M. ET / 1:00 A.M. PT for PC via Steam.
Check the timetable below to see what time the game was released in your region:
| Region | Local Release Time |
|---|---|
| United States (ET) | Friday, September 4, 2026, 4:00 a.m. |
| United States (PT) | Friday, September 4, 2026, 1:00 a.m. |
| United Kingdom | Friday, September 4, 2026, 9:00 a.m. |
| Central Europe | Friday, September 4, 2026, 10:00 a.m. |
| New Zealand | Friday, September 4, 2026, 9:00 p.m. |
| Australian East Coast | Friday, September 4, 2026, 6:00 p.m. |
| Australian West Coast | Friday, September 4, 2026, 4:00 p.m. |
| Japan | Friday, September 4, 2026, 5:00 p.m. |
| Philippines | Friday, September 4, 2026, 4:00 p.m. |
| South Africa | Friday, September 4, 2026, 10:00 a.m. |
| Brazil | Friday, September 4, 2026, 5:00 a.m. |
| Universal Time (UTC) | Friday, September 4, 2026, 8:00 a.m. |
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
|||||
| $24.99 |
Dungeon Settlers Review [Early Access]: Only Two Floors Deep and Already Impressive
The Dungeon Core Beckons!
If you’re familiar with the isekai genre across various media (anime, manga, and manhwa, for example), you'll recognize the idea of a protagonist being inexplicably capable with a specific game. It’s usually an RPG, and they’re usually some whiz with its mechanics, to the point of being whisked away to some other world for it.
I bring this up because Dungeon Settlers has the makings of that kind of game in its theming, presentation, and strategic complexity. It has the expanding layers some savant player could get lost in, but would turn the casuals away. It has the tier-based progression and character-based variety that would lend itself to an isekai story, should someone really get transported to a different world.
Most importantly, though, it’s got the no-nonsense grit of dungeon crawling that would draw in any RPG/strategy player, regardless of their isekai knowledge. This dungeon’s only two floors deep for now, but there’s much to explore and even more to talk about.
Saving the World, One Crawl at A Time
Despite my introductory pull utilizing isekai imagery, Dungeon Settlers’ story is a completely in-universe affair that concerns itself with a dying world and an intrepid crew trying their best to revive it. Players oversee a forward expedition party settling around and trying their best to conquer a dungeon accessible through a surface portal. Though survival is not guaranteed for each party member, the expeditions must continue, and the line of hopefuls looking to fight for a better world is as varied as it is lengthy—and so it continues.
The dungeon is comprised of five floors, the end of each one guarded by a powerful guardian. The guild sponsoring these expeditions can only open outposts within the dungeon once each guardian is cleared, and so the expedition party must try and try again to reach these major milestones and push for the dungeon’s core.
I’ll go ahead and say that this story is far from over, consisting only of the prologue and the dungeon’s first two floors, at least for the EA release. The devs have already previewed the rest of the floors, plus additional special dungeons down the line, but I need not wait for those to point out what does and doesn’t work for the game’s story…such as it is.
First off, the world-building. Dungeon Settlers has a strong start with its grand scale and appreciable amount of background lore for The Guild and the various races that make up the world. There are also plenty of side-missions to go with the floor-clearing to keep the background story momentum going, so there’s no issue of the narrative stakes ever fading into the background.
That said, my second point of criticism is far less forgiving, and it has everything to do with the game’s characters and characterization. Dungeon Settlers takes a page from Darkest Dungeon in that, instead of a set party of named heroes, players take control of an endless caravan of hopefuls destined to die and be replaced. While this worked for Darkest Dungeon, it’s only passable for Dungeon Settlers for one specific reason: effective NPC and boss characterization.
Darkest Dungeon makes up for the narrative facelessness of its main expedition party through the effective characterization of each member (apart from the mechanical differences), and the fact that the non-playable characters are just as memorable. The Provisioner, the Mastery Trainer, and the Survivalist- each of these is as well-known to the player as the bosses they eventually face in the dungeon, like the Swine Lord, the Prophet, or even the Collector.
Dungeon Settlers is almost completely unnamed, through and through, save for very few story NPCs found in the side-missions. It’s not a very put-together story of struggle among friends or cohorts just yet, just faces and hands doing things to meet a grand purpose; though that much I expect to change somewhat come 1.0. The fact that bosses are one-time stat-checks don’t help with that either, since there’s no real reason to remember them once you win.
Real-time Dungeon Crawling Was the Way to Go
Let’s get into the meat of Dungeon Settlers now, though, and discuss the game’s main draw: real-time strategic dungeon combat. Dungeon crawling as a game mechanic lends itself well to turn-based combat. Be it in TTRPGs or traditional RPGs, it just makes tactical sense to have all your cards to yourself on your turn and have your opponent do the same in a chess-sort-of way. Dungeon Settlers accomplishes the same satisfaction differently, though, because everything plays out in real time, and players must bark out their orders as previous ones are carried out.
Dungeon Settlers’ combat is a positional, grid-based, real-time strategic exercise that requires fast responses to enemy attacks and careful balancing of cooldowns. Players may pause the game at any time to give party members the orders they will carry out once time is resumed. This is not limited to combat, however, as even dungeon travel through hazards and resource collecting (and by extension its prioritization) can be accomplished through the same mechanics.
What differentiates Dungeon Settlers combat from other real-time strategy dungeon crawlers is, at the forefront, just how rare that is as a combination. Off the top of my head, only Legends of Grimrock and Torchlight II come to mind, barring MMOs, of course. Among those examples, Dungeon Settlers differentiates itself by being more focused on grid-based positioning and careful target prioritization over raw numbers or stacking status effects, though it does have both as well.
The game also utilizes a randomized roster of party members instead of having completely curated character progressions, so many variables are up in the air, and no two campaigns are ever the same.
What I like about this is that this variety results in combat that is rarely a slugfest of two statwalls just pounding at each other; it always ends up being a dynamic dance of differing strategies. It also helps the game immensely that survival is as important to dungeon crawling as combat is, and both are entwined enough to create a satisfying closed system.
Party members can tire and hunger naturally, or as a result of combat, and thus must camp out in the dungeon in the same way TTRPG characters do in games like D&D or Pathfinder. They may also have to do so to recuperate their moods, repair gear, or create more ammunition, and doing so almost always leaves them vulnerable to nighttime raids.
This push and pull of trying not to die and trying to survive keeps even the lull in action engaging, and the in-betweens of major scenarios as integral to the experience as possible. See, players don’t know when a dungeon ends, nor can they bail out for any reason once they opt to enter the next floor. One bad fight, one piece of food eaten too many, or one step too far, and there’s no hearing from that party again. There’s even an Iron Man mode, so save scumming isn’t an option.
If I must point out a flaw in Dungeon Settlers’ combat, it’s got nothing to do with the main beats of the system. The real-time combat is a killer idea; it’s what goes into it that I question. The characters themselves are a tad too random, and the means to tip the dice in the player’s favor are far too few. Starting stats are random, as are weapon proficiencies, levels, species, and traits. After that, level-up traits are also random, adjustable only through more resource expenditure, and even then, nothing’s guaranteed. Rimworld at least allows players to develop their colonists directionally after their initial randomness.
I understand the thrill in making the most of what the player’s given, but a dash more agency and a tad less randomness, even as an upgrade later down the line, would be what this game needs to feel like an absolute lattice of strategic decisions under each player’s purview.
Now, that said, all that strategy doesn’t require players to be in the dungeon. No, if they ever do manage to find a way out, more management comes to meet them in the form of their very own Rimworld-style, top-down colony.
Layered Colony Management Means the Gears Never Stop Turning
Expeditions take time, and reaching the bottom of the dungeon isn’t guaranteed. As such, players are required to create and manage a settlement around the topside dungeon portal so they can mount more expeditions, recuperate from previous ones, and overall improve their odds by getting better gear and new people.
This is Dungeon Settlers’ other experiential half, which is all colony management simulation next to a yawning portal. Any structures players build within dungeons are expectedly meager in comparison to what they can build here. Farms, rooms, entire guild halls; the settlement borders are the limit in the settlement layer, and even that can be expanded over time.
Settlement management in this game, as in its combat and dungeon crawls, starts simple, but expands to something almost overwhelming as more and more developments pile on the players' plates. Players begin with simple sleeping bags on the ground, but can eventually utilize overlapping systems to give their party the best chance at conquering the dungeon.
These mechanics include room bonuses for mood—which is a very stringent set of criteria covering room size, average floor and wall quality, decor points, and included workstations—crafting speed for workstations, storage filtering, research, workstation accessibility, special, dungeon-locked workstation requirements, and even visibility and bonuses for having proximity to fires.
It is a veritable mountain of things to juggle, and that’s not even considering the fact that party members get tired and hungry at the settlement too, and that the settlement keeps functioning while players are in a dungeon crawl. This means that going on a crawl with the settlement’s entire food supply is likely to result in a few dead adventurers when the party returns.
This much is a treat for me, despite the ungodly amount of stress and overthinking I had to do to manage everything the game had for me in this layer. It’s part of the charm, in my opinion, and far from impossible if the player is willing to put in work.
My favorite part of the settlement layer is how much it relies on the dungeon crawl system to move forward, and vice-versa. It’s clear from the outset that players were never meant to stay in the settlement for long, and that the dungeon should be an equally brief excursion, if the main goal was ever to be reached.
Food, especially in the early days, can only be found in the dungeon, never grown. Similarly, construction materials and research currency could also be looted from the dungeon and taken home. If players never left, they’d never have a base past a hovel. If all they do is crawl the dungeons, they’d be dead and gone by day three.
It’s a great and balanced cycle that repeats itself flawlessly and iterates on its own complexity as new variables come into play. More party members, new resources, more recipes, and better bonuses make the next dungeon run easier, allowing for more loot. Then the cycle begins anew.
Unfortunately, though intuitive and actually quite forgiving for the most part, there are times when the game forgets it’s a game and dials up the difficulty to a hundred. For good reason, mind you, but under no less overwhelming circumstances.
Can Be Unclear at Times
Among all of its moving parts, Dungeon Settlers’ archive of instructions, tutorials, and game knowledge is the only thing unable to keep up as new ideas come to play. Be it through poor translation resulting in terms found nowhere else in the game but the singular entry they’re in, or minor tooltips hidden away under a mountain of nested windows, there are times wherein the esoteric nature of the dungeon is more apparent than negligible.
To be clear, most of the game’s ins and outs are accessible through its built-in encyclopedia that even has a search function, and anything highlighted is a tooltip that can be frozen should it have other tooltips within it. My issue is that the quality of the content within both isn’t consistent.
Poor translations and possible pre-release lingo are just the tip of the iceberg too, with the keyword in my previous assertion being "most". Yeah, some tooltips are just straight up missing, wrong, or unclear, like the description for the Dining Room bonus.
It’s some EA quality-of-life woes that are to be expected from something literally not yet done, but the devs need to get on top of this ASAP. With this many things going on, one mote of vagueness is all it takes to start unravelling the game’s tapestry.
Consider this Crawler Hooked!
And so, we reach the end of Dungeon Settlers, or at least the end of its first couple of floors. The game is very early in its Early Access lifespan, evidenced by the inconsistency of its instructional material and the fact that only two out of the five total floors are even playable. Though not such a bad thing, it’s clear that this game has a long way to go before full release, and I don’t just mean in terms of content.
Some polish here and there is absolutely necessary, as some of the issues that I witnessed were part of the game’s fundamental systems and player experience. Adding just more stuff on top of that without fixing them will only serve to muddy the game’s quality as a whole.
That said, these first couple of floors were impressive. There was never a time when my strategic mind was ever disengaged, and the mental exhaustion that followed every session always felt satisfying, like a hard day’s work. I can’t wait to see what the other floors hold, but I can wait for the game to round out its rough edges first.
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