The results are in! going against all laws, conventions and best-practices of roguelike development, DarkGod rose and took the grand-prize for himself and the community around ToME-4. Congratulations!
Ascii Dreams holds a poll to choose the roguelike of the year 2010. Amazing number of candidates could make casting your vote a complicated matter. Even if your favorite game does not win remember there are also runners up and honorable mentions to be claimed.
Previous winners of this contest were Dwarf Fortress, DCSS and DoomRL.
Teratogen began as a project to test how well Go language lends itself to roguelike game development. It is graphical and hex-based. There have been several roguelikes with hex maps but Teratogen does it right. Your goal is to go down and find the source of mutagenic Tau wave while not getting chewed, bitten, maimed, crushed or shot. Survival horror adventure at its best.
On each floor there will be zombies and other mutated monsters. You have your hand gun and ammunition for fifty shots. When that ends or you get cornered prepare for a brawl. Various inhabitants of this wasted world generally do not exhibit much intelligence although eagerly follow blood trails. Whenever you splat a monster a disorganized red stain appears. Walk through it and you will leave bloody shoe marks.
The difficulty in Teratogen is your survival is based on two factors. Not getting killed which barely works on top floors and not losing one’s humanity which hardly works on deepest floors. Every defeated monster takes some of your humanity on death. As you become more and more deprived of your very self mutations manifest in your body. These are always very beneficial and useful. You are tempted to fully clear each floor … but that way lies madness. Before you make it halfway to the heart of evil you will turn into a chaos spawn without aware mind.
Mutations are especially noteworthy. One of them is lightning usable every fifteen turns. Use it near a group of enemies and watch as it arcs from monster to monster electrocuting everything in its path. Another is named cryogenics. Freezes targets into neat ice cubes patiently waiting to be shattered. Do so before they thaw or take time to run away. There is space for eight skills but only two are going to be filled.
Sadly development appears to have been put on halt. Google dropped a certain module from Go which is crucial to Teratogen’s code. Since the language has incomplete Windows support the game is playable only on Linux. Without a significant code overhaul this project will get easily forgotten.
Dance of Death is a flash roguelike game. You could be playing it right now instead of reading this review. While wonderfully portable you may need to agree few times to give it more storage on your hard drive. World inside is fully persistent and needs some space. It is divided into pieces just like wilderness map of ADOM. In DoD though, you can only move by going through borders of current area. Remember to use the ‘m’ap key to find the stairs to visit. Look for hints in your quest log. Finishing this dungeon means victory.
Skill based nature of Dance of Death makes creating right character crucial. Carefully tuning your attributes and skills can make the game a breeze. Lets take armor skill. The more heavy pieces of protective gear you wear the more it encumbers you. Up to a certain point decided by armor skill adding new parts will enhance your safety. Continuing above this threshold actually decreases your protection because burden makes you less capable of efficiently using your armor.
Hit point regeneration system is unusual. This does not happen automatically as time goes by reducing tedium of resting after every battle. Boring pillar dancing is gone as well. To heal you have to eat corpses. After a meal you will be revitalized for a short time. During this phase your health regenerates very fast. It is actually so quick there is no need to wait for hit points to reach maximum. Go find another monster or some new treasure. Revitalization is likely to end sooner. Unfortunate blow to this good design are never rotting monster corpses. With several in your pack you can munch some when in bad condition then run away a little while revitalization lasts and come back to finish wounded enemy.
Inventory takes a while to get used to if you have played roguelikes before. Hit ‘i’ to access it and when you highlight an item DoD will present you with number of actions you can take. Remember you need to eat not just to repair health. Bad things happen when your sustenance counter reaches zero. Overall a fine game with a strong coherent world but lacking in content due to still early development phase. Winnable in 15 minutes on second playthrough.
Expedition is just what the name suggests. You take an expedition into the unknown! Find unclaimed land, found a colony there and sail back to impress the royalty of Spain and get rich.
After being granted an audience in Alcazar of Segovia you start with two caravels, one carrack plus a bunch of sailors led by three captains. Make good use of 6000 maravedies you have. To establish a town you need to drop off one hundred people there and build a plaza. So take some colonists along. They are cheap but keep in mind they need to eat too.
One thing to note is controlling your expedition is not exactly straightforward. Left arrow will turn to portboard and right arrow will turn to starboard. Repeatedly pressing left arrow will not get you to America (*cough!* I mean Asia); you will sail in circles instead.
Ships have hull integrity points. Hazards like storms and reefs damage them. If a ship loses all integrity points it sinks possibly forcing you to forsake some cargo. Damaged ships sail slower so it is imperative to keep them in good condition. To make repairs you need free men and logs of wood. Take at least one carpenter with you. Two hundred logs should be enough to make it one way. Devastate some forest to get enough wood to get back safely.
Game is prone to sudden crashes. A rare event but even a hurricane is not as dangerous to your progress. On the good side Expedition has three interface modes to choose from. Java curses based, libjcsi based and graphical.
Expedition has fitting music. Just listen to it while sailing to new lands. Playing the game may seem easy but avoiding storms and trying to not let your crew starve at the same time is bound to cause troubles. May the winds favor you!
Hours at a computer have caused your strength and perception to decline…
but your mind couldn’t be better honed.
Forget Alphaman, Cataclysm is a open-ended free form roguelike ambiented on a post-apocalyptic future; you can play the current alpha version by SSH and delight with the wonderful detailed world. Be sure to explore the subway and the sewers!
Version 0.5 has two quests available. Completing the second results in victory. You have very limited turns before your first quest “Adulthood” begins automatically. Villagers kick you into the crevice and expect to stay there two days. Look to the right side of status bar for date and time.
Strong point of Cracks and Crevices is unified ‘u’se key which greatly reduces time needed to get into the game. While interface is well done (not counting a few bugs) playing experience is not as smooth. C’n'C is actually real-time. If you do not make a move during a specified interval character is assumed to be resting. Depressing effect it has on tactical play is very visible. Even on easy setting (up to 3 seconds per turn) one tends not to think when fighting because waiting too long will give opponent a free turn.
Combat is much less dynamic than expected. Most attacks end in misses and armor system is plain deflection. With two points of armor you can windshield kobolds. With four you do the same to orcs and so on. Accomplishing second quest consists of getting enough armor to be invulnerable and patiently bashing away until you opponent dies.
Definitely C’n'C is in a state where only hardcore roguelikers or those who wish to help author develop the game would want to play it. If you do press ’3′ to heal at the temple for free. Hopefully next version will be easier to get into.
Those of you who wish to follow Incursion development might want to join newsgroup where next progress reports will be made. The update recently added on game website is last one for two years or maybe more.
Albion, from Triangular Pixels, is a good looking blend of roguelike, cRPG and Tactics-like (for example: FF Tactics or Tactics Ogre) elements. It’s developed on Java and playable via JWS.
It had its first public release on the ARRP and looks pretty solid. They seem to be building on the basics and will evolve with character development and friendly towns from there. Theme is light and classic, yet it can be fun to play even in its current status.
It’s been more than a month, still, I present you the results of the first ever ARRP, directly from roguebasin! Short reviews will be made for each one in the following week,
