The true strength or weakness of this game (depending on your style of gameplay and your preferences) can be found in the game's gameplay and controls.

If you were expecting the kind of game where the sole purpose of the game was to create a dungeon and then play through it, you will be highly disappointed. Building dungeons is the purpose of this game but the way it is done is by linking the dungeon with the storyline.

When the game first starts out you only have the possibility of building only dirt dungeons. After completing the quest where you slay the manticore some new textures become available (the wood texture is an example). The more quests you complete the more building materials become available for you to purchase and place in your dungeon. Since you have to buy your building materials as well as armor, weapons, food, magic spells and potions, money is very hard to save.

This is where the game turns either really good or really bad. If you enjoy a slow moving hack-n-slash game that plays more like an RPG rather than a hack-n-slasher, Dungeon Maker 2 - The Hidden War might be a game for you. As you make your dungeon more complex and go deeper underground tougher monsters that give more money and better items will appear. However, saving the money to expand your dungeon can take a very long time so you're going to go back and forth into your own dungeon over and over and over again to slowly raise the funds to expand.

That's where I think the game got just too slow. The programmers should have made every monster drop some kind of coins. With the loot randomizer and my bad luck sometimes I ended up playing for 15 to 20 minutes without making a single penny. That alone made me take so many trips into my dungeon that I'm already bored of it and it's not even finished yet. Leveling and gearing your pet up might turn out to be the best ways to make money. Sometimes inside your dungeon you will find an entrance to another dungeon where only your pet can go in. Your pet can actually change shapes, swing a staff or even cast fireballs so if you carry a lot of potions with you and are lucky, some of the items that you need can be retrieved by your trusted pet. When you are in the Genju (your pet) dungeon you actually get to control your pet as if it were your own character. One last thing that I want to mention is the way your character raises his stats. Unlike most of the other games where you get experience for killing monsters and solving quests, in Dungeon Maker 2 you raise your stats through eating. There are plenty of food recipes that you can prepare and each recipe has unique properties. For example, one of the recipes raises health by 6 points; another raises health by 3, magic by 3 and intelligence by 1. Depending on what kind of character you want to build there are plenty of meals that will accommodate your playing style.