Posted on: December 17, 2016
dr_loove
Verified ownerGames: 338 Reviews: 9
Classic sensibilities, but no soul.
As a fan of the genre, and of retro-looking 3D graphics, this title caught my eye. But after finally beating the game's big boss I can say that the whole experience was rather bland. The Good: Many of the main staples of rougelike games are present here. Randomized levels. Unfair traps. All kinds of equipment to collect. And lots of dying. I also personally found the graphics to be fun because they reminded me of older games, even down to the stiff walking animations. With the voxel graphics and classical gameplay style it felt like a 2D game that suddenly grew a third dimension. But I know that aesthetic might not connect with everyone. It is also worth mentioning that this game has multiplayer support through LAN and direct-connect over the internet. That's a feature I wish more games of this genre had, but I didn't get a chance to try it out so I can't say whether it really added anything to this particular game. The Bad: Basically this game felt lazy. I'm not saying the game developers actually were lazy, but that feeling was still communicated to me as the player. To begin with items were scattered unceremoniously all across the levels. They were not in boxes or barrels, on pedestals, in chests, or otherwise presented to the player in any kind of interesting way. What's worse is that when I did find chests they were often empty or had nothing of value inside. There was just unblessed bits of armor, a piece of cheese, a decrepit torch, or something like that. It got to the point that I would often ignore chests if I had to do any kind of work to get them, especially on the rest levels between worlds (they were literally not worth the single lever I had to pull to open them). The hunger system of this game also felt tacked-on and unpolished. I understand that the developers wanted to increase the number of tough choices the player would have to make with their limited inventory space, but after a dozen runs it just felt silly to have to gorge on cheese and meat every five minutes. This game is just not expansive enough for thirst and hunger to make sense. It would have been better to just get rid of some of the player's inventory space and the whole hunger system at the same time, if they were trying to make inventory management more strategic. These are only a few examples of the problems I bumped in to with this game's design, and all of it left me feeling a little bored by the whole experience by the time I finished. The Verdict: This game lacks imagination and inspiration in a lot of ways, so don't expect any innovative mechanics or interesting aesthetic style. But in other ways it is also a solid example of a rougelike in the classical sense. There will be tense moments, tough choices, crushing defeats, and thrilling victories. But not much of it sticks after you finish the game because there is nothing to make it a memorable experience. The game is just not robust enough to create the sort of emergent stories that are so important to rougelike games and that make you want to share this game with your friends. To put it another way, this game lacks soul. So for fans of the genre who have nothing else to play I would say that this is a good little title to get you through until something more interesting comes along. I would definitely wait for a sale though. Bonus: I played with the level editor a little bit too. It was mildly fun to be able to build my own maze using the Barony engine, but all I could really do was place enemies and tiles. There was no ability to use any kind of scripting or to place specific items as far as I could tell, so all I could really do was build a maze in the simplest sense.
Is this helpful to you?
