• Tag Archives Roguelike
  • Legend of KEEPERS

    I can’t remember when it is I actually bought this game, but I only just got around to playing it this week.

    Generally speaking it’s similar in structure to Slay the Spire, as you progress down a series of choices before eventually reaching the final challenge of a run. Gameplay is quite different however since it’s not a card game. Instead, it’s more like classic turn-based RPGs with each enemy/ally being able to use one attack per turn.

    The base game comes with three player archetypes (although two of them have to be unlocked) each with their own perk trees and preferred gameplay styles. The default Slavemaster archetype appears to favor direct damage to morale and health while the Enchantress is more focused on debuffs and damage over time. The Engineer meanwhile (which I haven’t unlocked yet) presumably focuses on enhancing the trap mechanic. In addition to those, you can also buy three additional archetypes as DLC. Not sure how they stack up to the starters since none looked particularly interesting to me.

    General advice (when playing on Normal) would be to first focus on rewards that give new monsters until you have ~8-10 so you have a buffer for injury events or morale restoration, then switch to focusing on gold for training them all to higher levels. Manager upgrades are low priority for the most part since enemies should rarely reach the final area of a dungeon with a full lineup. Artifacts can be incredibly good… but they’re a crapshoot since what you get is totally random.

    Overall an okay time waster, but there’s definitely an issue with repetition.


  • Wildermyth

    Picked this game up around the same time as Gordian Quest.

    It’s more of a conventional tactical RPG with multiple storyline campaigns (featuring branching options) along with a randomized campaign function. That said, it also has a roguelike feature in the ‘legacy’ system. Basically, every time you clear a campaign the heroes used get saved and you can upgrade their ranks. Then you can re-use those heroes in legacy campaigns (storyline campaigns apparently require making new characters).

    The storytelling and questing aspects are extremely well done (if a bit odd in their comic panel presentation) while the combat is perhaps unfortunately a little simplistic with only three classes to choose from. I do like how the mystics can interact with the terrain though. That was an inventive touch.

    Basically what it comes down to is if you’re in it for the roleplaying then this game has quite a bit to offer you. If you’re looking for tactical complexity however you’d be better off looking someplace else. It may also be wise for those with a strong aversion to time limits to avoid, as time plays a fairly large role here… though I personally didn’t fine it onerous.


  • Gordian Quest

    Picked up this game on sale sometime last month, and it turned out to be a pretty good deckbuilding tactical RPG reminiscent of Slay the Spire.

    While that game’s a pure randomized roguelike, this has an actual story mode to it that plays out like a conventional tactical rpg. It’s also got tons of characters (each with three different decks to mix and match skills from), a wide variety of equipment (both randomized and static), and a ‘relic’ feature which lets you unlock permanent buffs to use across playthroughs.

    Finished the main campaign with a team of Jendaya, Alphonse, and Bertram. Artificer Jenda basically just set things on fire while the golem punched them and wasn’t particularly impressive aside from the Seismic Wave card. Headhunter Alphonse on the other hand is a beast if you go with his Assassin deck; Swift Kill and Assassinate with card draw and a 10-12 card deck results in a non-stop wave of death. I had Bertram go with Artillery, and that seems to have been a mistake. By the time the turrets got a turn Alphonse and the Golem had basically already killed everything.

    Some things to keep a look-out for are low level attribute, power, and resistance runes. Once you get to Act III they can be upgraded with Magic Dust (keep an eye out for this as well). Don’t forget about using your various maps to trigger exploration minigames either (visit Kyreal), as that’s basically the only place to find wandering vendors with otherwise rare/inaccessible upgrade items like Soul Sparks and Chromatic Shards. And don’t forget about Camping, since you can get 2 ‘free’ card upgrades per instance.

    Only other thing of note is that the last boss is pretty damn nasty. You’ll want to have as many buffs as possible along with high Chaos resistance and/or a bunch of health potions to deal with her waves of damage that trigger every 10 cards you play.

    So all-in-all it was an enjoyable experience, even if I did start to get a little burned out at the start of Act II.


  • desktop dungeons & UnderRail

    Desktop Dungeons can loosely be considered a combination of Darkest Dungeon and RuneStone Keeper. Like the former you play as an administrator overseeing an upgradable village supported by an infinite number of generic adventurers, and like the latter the main gameplay consists of taking a single adventurer through randomly generated puzzle-like hack&slash-focused dungeons.

    The problem I ended up having with it is basically the same problem I had with RS Keeper; puzzle-like gameplay + randomization adds up to annoyance more often than not. Add on to that the point of hack&slash gameplay being to turn off your brain and you get a game that’s somewhat self-contradictory to play.

    In comparison, Underrail is a conventional turn-based RPG in the vein of Fallout that’s quite thematically consistent in its goal of being an old-school resource-management hassle. To be honest I didn’t get very far into it at all, quickly dropping it when I realized enemies respawned but health had to be restored in town. The thought of going back and forth to kill the same group of molerats while fiddling with inventory/ammo management simply didn’t appeal to me at all.


  • Mordheim: City of the Damned

    Whereas Warhammer proper has you building armies to face off against one another, Mordheim narrows the focus down to skirmishes between two groups of 10 individuals or less.

    Visually, it’s pretty dire. Mechanically… it’s not much better.

    The concept of building/managing a warband is solid and the roguelike elements (Veteran achievements give bonuses across all warbands) are decent enough. The integration between the combat and exploration aspects however is sorely lacking; you basically have to focus on killing the enemy (since numerical superiority is essential) which means you won’t have time to loot anything notable from the battlefield. It’s almost like you’re being punished for success. The winning warband getting to loot everything in their direct line of sight or receiving an extra turn or two after a win to loot would’ve worked far better.

    The other, more significant, issue is that the combat isn’t any fun. Since all offensive actions draw from the same resource pool most of the time you end up standing in place trading basic attacks until someone misses once too often (which is often just once due to the similarity between enemy and ally health/damage totals). It’s incredibly dull and the spellcasting system being actively antagonistic certainly doesn’t help.

    In a sense the game is reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon in that you probably have to be a masochist to get any significant amount of enjoyment out of it.


  • Book of DEMONS – Archer & Mage

    Once you reach 5th level with the starting class you can play as the other two classes (note that nothing carries over between classes), both of which seem notably better.

    The archer has the distinction of being able to attack off-screen, greatly reducing the annoyance caused by ranged attackers and letting you mow down the hoards before they’re even aware of your presence. Equip a Quiver and Splitting Arrows and she just rains down utter devastation with little effort. The lower starting HP is an issue though and she can’t use arrows if enemies get too close.

    The mage doesn’t seem to have any distinguishing features at all beyond an abysmal starting HP pool. I guess you could say he excels at crowd control thanks to his lightning/ice spell options… but a split-arrow archer can accomplish something similar while attacking at far greater range. So I’m rather underwhelmed at his pre-Cook performance. Maybe later spells are more devastating?

    At this point I doubt I’ll ever touch the starting class again, but the archer is enjoyable in small bursts (due to sidestepping a lot of annoying enemy abilities) and I’ll probably keep playing on-and-off between doing other things for a while yet.


  • Book of DEMONS & Some Other Games

    Book of Demons is a hack & slash game with some minor roguelike elements modeled on the first Diablo. One greatly simplified into a mobile game format where you walk along rails while clicking on anything in your ‘light radius’ to interact with it, and equipment/skills are represented by upgradable cards that you can assign to unlockable action bar slots.

    Despite its simplicity and lack of depth (leveling up gives a choice between +1 Health or +1 Mana), it ends up a pretty fun diversion in the vein of Candy Crush for when you have a few minutes to kill. Not sure what sort of longevity it’ll have though since the levels are so far are all pretty similar (up to the Cook quest boss) with the abilities of various enemies occasionally crossing over into ‘bullshit’ territory.

      As for the titular “other games”:
    • Sword Legacy: omen – I installed this ages ago, played the first battle or two, and then put it aside out of general disinterest. I can safely say now that I have no intention of ever touching it again.
    • MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD – Got through the opening, messed around in the training area for a while… and then promptly uninstalled when I discovered all the hunts have time limits.
    • The: QUEST – A game styled after classic first-person RPGs (think Might & Magic X: Legacy), it felt to me both empty and overpopulated. Leave town and there’s a whole bunch of nothing in every direction, yet there’s also an inexplicably large number of scantily-clad archers waiting to kill you. There’s just a pervading sense of unease about the whole affair.
    • DEEP SKY DERELICTS – After spending a minute or two wandering around the first ship finding a whole lot of nothing, I ran into a battle. There I discovered that every action you take in combat reduces your Energy level (run out of Energy and you die; moving also costs energy). I have no interest whatsoever in dealing with such severe resource management bullshit.
    • Celestian Tales: OLD NORTH – The characterizations are all pretty painful and the visuals are notably lackluster.

  • Children of MORTA

    A roguelike with actual (albeit heavily sentimental) plot/character development along with gameplay quite similar to Diablo‘s, Children of Morta expects you to run through the same semi-randomized levels multiple times with different characters hacking and slashing through hoards of enemies.

    In addition to standard unlockable upgrades such as increased drop rates, stat boosts, and additional playable characters, the game also features specialized universal buffs that automatically unlock as a character spends skill points. I presume this is to make it less of an annoyance that you can’t just play one character exclusively (your maximum health takes a major hit if you use the same character 3+ times in a row). This results in something of a middle ground where you have to grind to progress, but the variety in the characters’ playstyles makes it less onerous than it would otherwise be.

    As mentioned the gameplay is like Diablo’s, just somewhat compressed (and lacking an equipment system). One key difference that greatly affects the difficulty is that health potions here are both far less effective and completely random; sometimes you get 3-4 from a single enemy group, sometimes you’ll go an entire floor without seeing any. Being lucky enough to find a charm/blessing that grants regeneration or increased healing is often the difference between success and failure… although it’s not like there’s any penalty for failure, so while annoying I guess it’s not really all that big an issue.

    At the moment I’ve only just completed the first zone with one character at level 9, two at 8, and one at 6 (I haven’t used the recently unlocked fire mage yet). My strategy so far has been to run through the first level until a character hits level 4, the second until they hit 6, and then the third until they hit 8. It’s been working pretty well progression-wise and I haven’t had to run through the same level with the same character more than twice (though not all have successfully beat each boss).

    Hopefully that trend will continue in the later zones.


  • STAR RENEGADES

    Structurally, this game is similar to Slay the Spire: Traverse three semi-randomized branching paths capped by a static boss fight, fighting turn-based battles and collecting items along the way, concluding with a much smaller endboss level.

    As a roguelike, you’re expected to play through multiple times with different characters in order to unlock various features such as new classes, class variations, individual character bonuses, a larger pool of possible equipment spawns, and a few relatively expensive general ease of use buffs (e.g. additional merchants). Like StS it manages to avoid feeling like these unlocks are a grind or the main purpose of playing; it’s perfectly possible to win with the starting characters on your first playthrough. The endboss changing after every win is a particularly nice touch that provides a remarkable amount of variety.

    Combat is a pretty straight-forward affair with everyone (usually) getting one action a turn and each action having a different speed value which determines the action order. Where the strategy comes into play is that if you attack before your opponent, that attack will end up a guaranteed critical hit. Whereas criticals in most games are just a simple +% damage, here each attack has its own specific bonus and each critical hit also refills the equivalent of your mana pool (used for free actions or combo attacks). Which means making sure you attack before your opponent is essential to success. A task assisted by a stagger system which lets you delay an enemy’s action a certain number of times.

    All in all it provides a remarkably well balanced mix of randomization and skill. Oh, but do be aware that the style of humor is extremely irreverent (think Cosmic Star Heroine).


  • Darkest Dungeon – Update

    Two possible solutions came to mind to address my main issues with the game:

    A) Mod the inventory/provision system to be less nonsensical.
    B) Refuse to buy any provisions besides food/torches and retreat the moment further progress became impossible.

    As it would happen, modding the relevant parts of the game is beyond simple; the inventory files are in plain text. Even better, it’s also pretty simple to remove/reduce the ridiculous hunger checks.

    Those changes helped quite a bit. I still have to treat every adventurer as disposable meat, to be dismissed the moment they return from a failed quest, but at least some tangible progress can be made toward building up the Hamlet facilities. Can’t say I enjoy the game though… since having to face near-constant failure/retreat is more than a little exhausting… but at least it’s now tolerable as a periodic diversion. Sort of like an actively antagonist Rezrog (which is far more stable today than it was at release) in a way.