Dungeon Hack is, sadly, a good idea poorly implemented. The game employs a reworked version of the Eye of the Beholder engine to create a real-time single-character graphical roguelike that allows you to customise its random dungeons. It also offers some new features, such as the addition of an automap and a new class – the Bard.

However, making it a real-time single-character roguelike that uses the AD&D 2nd edition rules is also what virtually damns it.

Dungeon Hack is a very straightforward roguelike, in which you descend through a dungeon without any sort of shop or rest stops along the way, killing monsters and finding loot in a randomly generated labyrinth with simple puzzles normally involving putting a dozen keys into a dozen types of door until you find or kill the objective at the bottom of it.

Along the way you'll battle some of the over fifty monsters present in the game – including liches and invisible feyrs – and face hazards such as underwater levels, anti-magic fields and starvation.

Yet between the over-reliance on die rolls, the awkward challenge of quickly controlling your actions in real time and its AD&D adaptation, having a properly fun time is distressingly just out of range.

Given that TSR's AD&D rules are designed for turn- and party-based RPG combat, it should be no surprise that they are troublesome in a game built around a single character exploring a dungeon in real time. There was no effort in adapting the rules, so classes such as the Bard, Mage, and Thief are practically useless, as the game hardly provides any benefit to playing them. Most locked objects require specific keys, and the combination of real-time combat with a slow spell interface make the Mage virtually useless and easily killed here.