A small Dungeon Crawler with a relatively rare combat system.
The game is announced for the Windows platform.
The gameplay is a roguelike Dungeon Crawler based on dice rolls.
First, I recommend carefully reading the tutorial from the menu item "How to play"?". Here you can get acquainted with some of the nuances of the game. Description takes several pages.
At the start of the game you will be asked to choose the difficulty of the game and the type of character.
The choice of hero is quite important, so I decided to dwell on it in more detail. It is here that you can catch the first trends of imbalance.
There are three classes that are obviously more powerful: Archer, Warrior and Mage. The horns look very pale against their background. Double damage from the corresponding types of attacks is a lot.
The amount of initiative that can be rolled differs for different characters. But there’s no need to worry too much about it. Random is really very random here. For example, I played rogue, which in theory should always go first – nothing like that, low values may persistently fall out.
We get into the dungeon and begin to explore it step by step. When moving, the move is to open (you need to click on the card) the next card in the stack. There may be: battles, treasures or a merchant.
Battles. If there is a monster on the next map, then a fight begins.
The game uses the following combat system:
– Initiative is taken first. Whoever has more will go first throughout the battle. If there is a tie, initiative is rerolled until a winner is identified.
– Equipment items are essentially cubes from which certain actions will fall out. An interesting and important nuance – there can be as many items in the bag as you like, and the cubes can be “burned”. As a result, we need to collect the most optimal deck of cubes and there can be no more than 30 of them. The correlation between the number of cubes and equipment drives me into a stupor. In general, at first it seems (and this is logical) that one object is 1 cube with the corresponding faces. In fact, it turns out that this is not quite the case, but how – I never got in, even after spending quite a lot of time in the game. 6 items – 19 cubes, 15 items – 30 cubes, there is armor – there is no such cube at all. How does this work?
– When the dice are rolled, it’s time for action. The one who goes first is in chocolate. He shoots the opponent with dropped skills, steals spells and, in general, dominates in every possible way. A small compensation can be considered that if the second one gets invisibility or paralysis/grid, then the effect remains for the next turn. But go ahead, put together such a build and place a bet on it.
– Very important point. When it’s our turn to hit, we need to manually press the icons of the corresponding actions under the character’s portrait and some of the special skills (if dropped) to the right of it. Only archery and magic arrow skill occur automatically.
– There are several standard skills https://jackpotstarcasino.co.uk/games/ and a bunch of special skills. Common skills: defense (protects you from receiving melee or ranged damage), ranged attack (occurs automatically), melee attack (must be pressed manually), general magic attack (must be pressed manually), loot (collect some gold), dice with a cross (does nothing, in fact it is a failed roll.). There are a lot of special skills; there is a window where their icons and descriptions are listed.
– During combat turns, dice are poured from the deck bag (brown) onto the table and then into the end bag (red). When all the dominoes are cleared, they are returned to the deck and played again. This achieves some balance, i.e.To. There’s no way you can constantly spam the strongest cubes.
– When the exchange of blows is completed, you need to press the arrow and this will start the next round.
Opponents. There are quite a lot of types of enemies. It is proposed to defeat three bosses per visit, then this is a victory and we will get nothing (well, maybe an achievement). Bosses are not static, there are several types of them.
Even simple enemies can drink blood. The randomness of the dice is very large. The fight can easily last 12-15 rounds. Or you can kill the boss in one move, depending on your luck.
Trade. Sometimes there is a merchant in the dungeon. He sells a variety of equipment. There are a lot of types of equipment.
Every race begins with a trading window. The most effective items cost much more than 100 gold (but less than 200), this determines the effect of starting gold on difficulty. It’s one thing to go into battle with ordinary gear, and quite another – with at least one top item.
At the same time, trading in the dungeon is not very convenient, because.To. does not give the player any freedom of maneuver when he appears. Why? And it’s very simple. For example, we farmed gold, you can buy something good. A merchant appeared. It would seem that we should be happy. But there is one point that can ruin everything – if we have the maximum number of cubes, then we won’t be able to buy anything. And the mechanics do not provide for the removal/burning of less effective cubes at this stage. Closing the trade window means the area will be abandoned. Thus, you must constantly get rid of the least needed dominoes and run with an incomplete deck. There are pros and cons to this, but for now it works like this.
Treasures. Sometimes you can find equipment in the dungeon. Its properties are shown and there is a choice – to take the item or not.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of the game and summarize.
+ Simple but nice graphics. There are exceptions, about them in the cons.
+ Good music and sound.
+ Good combat system, although with some bugs.
+ Many types of enemies, enough bosses.
+ Many types of equipment.
+ Significant differences in playthrough styles of different heroes.
+ Random generation of each session.
THINGS THAT CAN BE BOTH A PLUS AND A MINUS:
+- This is a session roguelike. There is no long adventure or leveling up between approaches. The game is completed in about an hour.
+- Random rules the game. Roga can constantly lose the initiative to some worms. You can pick an unfortunate boar with 4 units of life for 20 rounds. Personally, I liked it, although sometimes I got burned from the slowness of the battle. You can increase the speed of throwing dice, this will speed up the rounds somewhat.
– Clumsy portraits of some enemies. And some of the characters are clearly drawn “simpler” than others.
– There is no clear correlation between equipment and deck dice. All this somehow works incomprehensibly. The apotheosis of this ambiguity was the situation when there was armor at the start, but the corresponding die was not in the deck at all.
– You cannot manage cubes at a merchant. Although it would be logical. And you can’t sell unnecessary items.
– There is no way to save the entry if you urgently need to turn off the computer or game. The developer is currently working on this.
– It is possible to catch a critical bug with freezing. We’ll have to start from the beginning. This happened to me once during 4 hours of play.
– No Russian localization of text. The required level of knowledge of English is low. Basically you will need to understand standard gaming terms.
CONCLUSIONS OBJECTIVE
Quite an original Dungeon Crawler made in the form of a bagel with dice rolling.
CONCLUSIONS ARE SUBJECTIVE
In this case, we managed to overcome the main drawback of roguelikes – to make it so that when a character dies, there are no regrets about him. Usually, roguelikes are artificially made more difficult so that it is impossible to get anywhere right away, it takes a lot of attempts and there is a feeling of a waste of time. At the same time, very often you absorb a minimum of content per visit, which devalues each individual session.
The game is perceived as a session with the ability to complete it from beginning to end in a reasonable time (about forty minutes to an hour). And then play the next game, try new builds and test your luck. What’s attractive is that they let you play even in losing approaches. The game has some bugs and inconsistencies, but, in my opinion, there are more advantages.
PS: I probably didn’t cover all the aspects, I might have missed something. I will be glad to add/correct the review or answer questions along the way in the comments.