Soda Dungeon 2

Soda Dungeon 2 is the rare sequel that doubles as an apology tour: everything players asked for after the first game, delivered. AN Productions and Poxpower, with Armor Games Studios publishing, brought the soda-powered dungeon crawler back in July 2020 with a whole town to upgrade, a crafting system, new classes and alternate dimensions to conquer, all free to play. The Steam rating sits at Very Positive and the iOS rating sits near the ceiling of its page, because this is a franchise that lives on phones and treated the desktop version as a courtesy.

The premise is unchanged and still the best joke in idle RPGs: you own the tavern at the dungeon's mouth, heroes drink your soda, and the soda makes them brave enough to descend. You never swing the sword yourself. You recruit the oddballs who will, dress them, and send them down a hole to die productively, because loot banks even on a total party wipe. Every failed run still buys tavern upgrades, and every upgrade makes the next descent deeper.

What the loop feels like

You hire a medic, the party survives the mid floors for the first time, and the haul pays for a forge back in town. The forge makes the next ten floors trivial. That's Soda Dungeon 2.

A new dimension opens, the enemies turn strange, and your carefully assembled veteran team becomes a science project again. You lean on weird class combinations you would never have tried in the opening hours, and half of them work. That's Soda Dungeon 2.

What the sequel adds

The town is the headline. Where the original Soda Dungeon had a tavern with a handful of upgrade knobs, the sequel has a settlement: smithies, stables and labs that each feed the expedition economy. Crafting gives equipment a mid-game, so a good drop matters before and after the dungeon run that produced it. The new classes shake up the party math, and the alternate dimensions work as both prestige layers and difficulty curves, each one resetting your context without erasing your progress. Community guides for the later dimension builds have become their own small literature.

Automation rounds it out. The dungeon crawl itself stays hands-off by design: you set the party and the destination, then watch, interrupting only when the medic queues run dry. It is an idle game first, and the clicking is optional.

Where it stumbles

The inheritance cuts both ways. The art and humor carry over almost wholesale, so returning players will recognize every sprite and gag, and the early hours retread the first game's floors before the new systems open up. The free-to-play structure also shows its phone origins: the desktop build plays cleaner, but the economy still gestures at the boost-and-timer shop every few screens. And players who want mechanical depth should calibrate expectations, since the strategy is about party composition rather than moment-to-moment play.

Playing it today

Free on Steam for Windows and Mac, and free on iOS and Android. The phone versions carry ads and in-app purchases per Android Police's coverage; the desktop build is the cleaner way to play, a rare inversion of the usual port economics. The original Soda Dungeon remains free alongside it, and if you want this party-management loop with far deeper itemization at the cost of a steeper on-ramp, Dragon Cliff is the natural next step.

The verdict

A sequel that listened, carbonated as ever. If you bounced off the first game's simplicity, the town, crafting and dimensions give it the depth it was missing; if you loved the first game, this is more of exactly that, for free, on every screen you own.