Posted on: July 1, 2016

nuclearunicorn7
Verified ownerGames: 272 Reviews: 8
Amazing combat, little else
Tales of Maj'Eyal is a roguelike where they decided to focus on making a great combat system at the detriment of everything else that you tend to find in other roguelikes. To elaborate on this point, your character has a large number of skills, infusions, charms, etc. that are not only available during your various combat encounters, but also very often required. The only time you're going to ignore actions is if you're playing poorly. Each class plays fairly differently from the others and there's a lot of them. Then there's the flip side of this. The game has no management of consumables, the ID game usually found in these sorts of games is nonexistent with cursed equipment being a drawback for a single skill category, there's no equivalent of a hunger clock, equipment is pretty much all boring with a focus on incremental upgrades as opposed to goals for gear that you can plan around, no sort of alignment system, etc. Missing these things does not make ToME a bad game as I still love it despite the absence of these things, but it's important to establish in what ways this game is different from other roguelikes so that veterans of the genre have some idea what they'd be getting into.
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