1) This game is REALLY easy, even on the hardest setting its a complete faceroll  
2) Shitty art style that forces you to play as some ugly penny arcade reject that fights slimes, totally detaching you from giving a god damn about your character 
3) Abysmal music that gets repetitive about 10 minutes in 
4) Absolutely useless skills. You literally have 98% of the recipes available with level 1 smithing. Deep! 
 5) megaboring copy-paste rooms. EVERYTHING looks the same. I'd rather take an underground ASCII forest over this ugly boring turd any day of the week.
 
TL;DR game blows go play a real roguelike

To be fair, copy-paste rooms are one of the required tenets for a game to be considered a Rogue-like.

If that was TL:DR for anyone, they shouldn't even be on the internet.

I'm pretty sure it's aim is to make Rougelikes more accessible and add some humor to it, in that regard it succeeds.

@NekuSakuraba said:

I'm pretty sure it's aim is to make Rougelikes more accessible and add some humor to it, in that regard it succeeds.

The Cynical Brit agrees with this take.

Its obviously not aiming to be a hardcore roguelike, but i think its pretty clever and humorous. For 5 bucks theirs not much to bitch about here imo.

1) This game is REALLY easy, even on the hardest setting its a complete faceroll  2) Shitty art style that forces you to play as some ugly penny arcade reject that fights slimes, totally detaching you from giving a god damn about your character 3) Abysmal music that gets repetitive about 10 minutes in 4) Absolutely useless skills. You literally have 98% of the recipes available with level 1 smithing. Deep!  5) megaboring copy-paste rooms. EVERYTHING looks the same. I'd rather take an underground ASCII forest over this ugly boring turd any day of the week. TL;DR game blows go play a real roguelike

I swear I´ve never heard the term "roguelike" until this article on GB a couple of days ago.
Anyway, the game has a REALLY unappealing artstyle, otherwise I would be really interested in it.

@Superfriend said:

I swear I´ve never heard the term "roguelike" until this article on GB a couple of days ago. Anyway, the game has a REALLY unappealing artstyle, otherwise I would be really interested in it.

Really? It's a fantastic little genre that in no small part the reason for the Diablo series.

There are better roguelikes that are totally free, but not everyone has a taste for ASCII graphics or learning a dozen or more keyboard shortcuts.

If nothing else this succeeds in being more accessible than the ADOMs or Nethacks of the world. But I think it's perfectly decent game, especially for only $5.

Can't say I disagree on the note that the art style is a major turnoff. A mishmash of realistic old-style pixel art and cartoon creations by Tim Buckley.

Can't say I disagree on the note that the art style is a major turnoff. A mishmash of realistic old-style pixel art and cartoon creations by Tim Buckley.

Nethack fanboy screaming again... 
The game is awesome and well worth the money. ASCII based roguelikes all have different 
key configurations and it's a mess to learn more than couple of those to play decently. 
Sure, Nethack and ADOM are legends but so is many other games that no one plays anymore. 
 
1) Too easy if you play it like you have to play ADOM.
2) Better art style than any ASCII-rogue 
3) Better music than in any ASCII-rogue to date
4) Any of the skills don't require button-combo
5) Go to your #...# then
 
See where I'm going?

3) Better music than in any ASCII-rogue to date

People are saying it's not fair to judge this game harshly because it's "only $5". Bullshit.
 
There are dozens more FREE roguelikes that are MANY times better. If I'm paying for something that I could get free elsewhere, I expect a premium experience. It is not to be found here. It's not worth anyone's time, people experienced in the genre or people unexperienced. Stone Soup is accessible as well and much better.

I think the worst part about it is that you can equip a traffic cone onto your character and it won't show up on the sprite. How can you waste that kind of oppurtunity. I would rather not have loot than have unique loot that doesn't actually show up on the character at all. It's just lazy.

@Phonics said:

@AndrewB: you are living in a world where modern warfare 3 will sell a billion copies.

I'm pretty certain you're about 975,000,000 copies off.

@AndrewB said:

If that was TL:DR for anyone, they shouldn't even be on the internet.

I agree with this entirely. Sadly, it eliminates about 90% of internet users.

For me it was a nice reminder of the genre. I'd pretty easily recommend it for people new to Roguelikes. After a couple hours though, I moved onto Tales of Maj'Eyal. Hopefully the genre in general can make a more mainstream combat. I'd love to see something with a little bit more (and not cartoony) graphical flare and a decent story/quest system.

This is gonna sound weird, but I think this is the only type of game I could see myself contributing to as a UI/graphic designer. Might be a fun project.

@Phonics said:

@snide: I've never tried / heard of Tales of Maj'Eyal but that chain lightning screenshot instantly sold me on it. It looks like a really funky combination of tiles/ASCII/basic spell effects from the screens.

Yeah, the screens are terribly old. The new version is under pretty active dev and while it's still a tile based game, it's still definitely a looker.

DCSS for life yo.

Now with webtiles.

Man I tried out Tales of Maj'Eyal briefly and it seems pretty amazing. One thing Dungeons of Dredmor did right was made me want to play real roguelikes again. 

@NuclearWinter: Can you sell me on DCSS vs. ToME. Maybe it's the picky designer in me, but I generally just like the UI of ToME better. Does DCSS has an overarching story of any kind? Kinda really like the lore, quests and towns in ToME.

I think the worst part about it is that you can equip a traffic cone onto your character and it won't show up on the sprite. How can you waste that kind of oppurtunity. I would rather not have loot than have unique loot that doesn't actually show up on the character at all. It's just lazy.

@snide:

Actually I haven't tried ToME4 so can't really comment on that :)

I was surprised to hear you prefer to hear you prefer the UI, as the DCSS tiles client had the best UI I've seen in a traditional roguelike (the browser version is still in early development and not comparable to the client). It's full of great convenience features like Auto Explore and mouse based inventory/quick item/spell slots. It sounds like ToME4 does some of this too though.

If you're interested in things like lore and quests then DCSS may not be for you though. It's strength lies in the mechanics and I think in terms of pure dungeon crawling and combat there are none better that I've tried. It's just excellently designed and balanced for a roguelike (though not without its own problems). It leaves out all the spoiler stuff that plague the likes of ADOM or Nethack, and focuses on killing you through brutal combat encounters. When you die in Crawl (and you will, a lot) it's more likely due to a tactical/player mistake than some cheap gotcha death. Which is exactly how I like it :)

ToME4 sounds interesting too.

DoD is fun, accessable, and generally has decent humor. It is definitely a gateway drug to more serious RL for people that have never heard of/played before. There's nothing wrong with that, and it is a good game on its own merits.

As far as more classic RLs:

http://slashie.net

Slashie has made some crazy RLs, including one of my favorites, Castlevania RL. Most of them aren't finished, but they're pretty crazy, like the MegaMan RL and Metroid ones.

What's a faceroll?
 
EDIT:  I looked it up.

@Phonics: those dumb eyebrows made it an immediate Do Not Buy for me. Something about them just pisses me off.

I agree, a complete waste of 5 bucks for me... hated the art style, the music is downright horrendous, your dude is always the same stupid looking guy with a vest no matter what gear you have on... and like the OP said, not much of a challenge.
 
All in all not a good game at all, roguelike or not, I'll stick with Powder, Angband and Dwarf Fortress for the time being thank you very much.
 
edit: BTW I recommend Powderto anyone new to this genre, it's very easy to pick up and play and it's free, there's also a DS version in case your DS can run homebrew apps.

Well, since we're all now recommending other roguelikes, I'm going to recommend Reaping the Dungeon/Dungeon Rogue :)

@NuclearWinter: You might enjoy ToME. The tiles and spell effects are getting pretty nice. I'm talking with the creator currently and am going to try and contribute some icon sets and the like :)

Here's a video that shows some of it off.

this game is for chumps like me who like the concept or roguelikes but dont want to look at ascii graphics so have never tried

i'm sorry roguelike fans

(its fun)

@tsolless: Wonder who ever said that this game was meant for ASCII fanboys?

reason: it's on steam and my friends are playing it too

i wonder if dave's gonna be in on this quicklook :3

@littlecaesar said:

@tsolless: Wonder who ever said that this game was meant for ASCII fanboys?

Har. Again, Stone Soup, it uses a texture pack by default, though you can get those for basically any ASCII roguelike.  And you know what? They look better than this game's mismatched abomination of an artstyle.   There is no reason to get this game for experienced people, OR people new to the genre.

I am floored by this thread. Jesus...

@Phonics: You're totally right, i love bad games! they're fun.

I have read the title again as you suggested. if you are what qualifies as a rougelike fan, then lord help us all because damn.

This game is meant to be a fun quirky representation of the genre, it's not for you anyway. But it's good that you've informed your fellow kind that it's not for them. It really is.

@AndrewB: you are living in a world where modern warfare 3 will sell a billion copies.

Picked this up, mainly because of the Quick Look, but also because of the sanctimonious attitude of the rogue purists up in here. Seems like a pretty fun little diversion from the hour or so I've played so far.

Oh look, insulting people for liking a game. That's new and interesting. 

I hate everything about the game's art style.  Not even a price of 5 bucks will make me look past that.

I bought it because everyone in here is so angered by it, which told me it must be pretty good!
 
And it is, entertaining, decent little game.  It's not incredibly complex, but if I want to sit in the dark playing an incredibly complex, masochistic game by myself while staring at ASCII graphics, I think I'll opt to masturbate with sandpaper.