I've been playing around with several rogue-lites in my collection lately. I'm not the greatest fan of the Rogue concept and always rather sceptical towards claims of replayability. In order for a game to hold my interest despite making me start over again and again, there has to be some significant variety in the runs and ideally also some kind of permanent progression on top of it. Hand of Fate and Slay the Spire are rogue-lites that work surprisingly well for me in this regard, but I've also been playing those of the FPS variant like Ziggurat, Immortal Redneck, and Tower of Guns.

I think Ziggurat will be the first among those that I'm going to drop for good, after spending about 90 minutes with it. Admittedly I don't seem to be very good at it, IIRC I never made it past one of the first level bosses. But I'm not really motivated to keep trying either. It just doesn't feel satisfying enough to play for a longer time. Everything is pretty basic. You can have four different weapons, but in the first level you only ever get access to two, and one of them is always the same one, while the other one exhausts its mana pretty quickly so you're back to using the first, which is also the most unexciting one. Enemies drop small amounts of mana and xp (both of which vanishes if you don't pick it up in time), and from what I've seen that's all, there are no items, no consumables, no perks. On level up you get to choose between two different cards with passive advantages on it, so there's that, but it just isn't enough. And there seem to be only two things you unlock with your runs. The first are new cards for level up, which leaves me quite indifferent, since I didn't even know what cards the default deck contained in the first place. And the second are new characters to play, but for one, you don't even see them in FPP, and then their descriptions are so vague that it's hard to tell the difference between them. For example, with the first character it just says his stats are balanced but you can't even seem to look at any stats and see what they are. And then for the second character (a female one) it says nothing about her abilities, just a short sentence about her story background. So is she not as balanced as the first one then? Or is she the very same character just with a female voice? The game does not tell you. The third character, first one you unlock, is said to be strong with wands, worse with everything else. But again, you don't really learn what that means. And the game never explained the difference between wands, staffs, spells and whatever the fourth kind of weapon is to you anyway (and as I said, you only ever get to see two of them during the first level). Add to that that the layout of the rooms and the enemies quickly repeat themselves, that melee enemies just come running straight at you, forcing you to kite them while shooting at them with your basic, quickly depleting wand (?), that enemies come in waves, constantly popping out of nowhere again when you've defeated others, and that the player movement feels somewhat slow as well - to me it just doesn't offer a lot of fun beyond the first 1 hour or so. Oh, and it selects the game language based on your OS language, another pet peeve of mine. You can manually change it in the menu, after the story intro, but everytime you run the game, it will reset it and override your previous choice.

Now, Tower of Guns only gives you one type of gun for the whole run - but it has endless ammunition and the gameplay is fast paced, with kickass music to drive you on, rooms are bigger and varied, with extra features like jump pads etc, plus enemies have different movement patterns and don't just come straight at you, and you get various pickups as well. And Immortal Redneck, while playing similar to Ziggurat, has a greater selection and variety of weapons with more punch to them, plus a skill tree that carries over to different runs.