Tomb Titivator
Posts: 879
Joined: Tuesday, 26th April 2011, 17:10
TOME 4 impressions
So, are you tired of item destruction, food/contamination management, lack of lore and the complete purposelessness of getting some stupid Orb which doesn't even do anything? Do you like a roguelike with a plot, graphics and tons of ambience? Do you like literally walls of text describing your equipment's attributes? Do you like completely off the wall wacky abilities your character can have, like breaking the whole darn space-time continuum so that you can time travel, being able to wield three weapons at once, or putting monsters into nigthmarish sleep while you become a version of the sandman who can actually enter the monsters' very dreams and kill them while they are still asleep? Do you like insanely fun sounding classes like Oozemancer, Mindslayer and Solipsist? Would you like to be able to build your own freaking class completely?
Also, do you enjoy bugs? Possibly game-ending bugs? Game-breaking bugs? Hilariously broken and/or unblanced abilities that make it optimal to, say, use scouting ablities before every freaking fight all the time (hello divinations X 100)? Do you like literally walls of text describing your equipment's attributes? Do you like to get one-shotted by unseen monsters? Do you like to get one-shotted by monsters from out-of-LOS? Do you like to cheese monsters who can't see you and kill them with ranged attacks outside of their LOS?
If your answer is "yes" then you probably should go download TOME right now and stop reading this.
I think overall TOME is quite different from Crawl maybe resembling more ADOM than Crawl in terms of design (but obviously TOME development has been much more active than ADOM's over the last ten years). It has tons of lore and wacky and interesting abilities but also major grinding/balance/bug issues compared to DCSS. It also feels surprisingly heavy on the computer CPU (compared to other roguelikes, that is, but it does have decent graphics).
TOME feels also quite complex in terms of what you need to know: A single piece of armour can easily have like a dozen special properties in addition to armour rating. The game offers you a huge amount of information, you can for example see the damage your dealing by damage type and exact numbers all the time, but still much of the information is hidden (like what your equipment actually does in addition to the wall of text you have already read). Also, at least some small parts of the information that is provided is, you guessed it, bugged.
Tome is a very class-based game but same classes may end up looking quite different depending on what you choose to develop (and depending on the given class, some don't have much to choose from at all and many talents are just too good to pass while others can be almost completely useless). So there is room for adapting to item finds etc. too. There is an enormous amount of different talents (=skills) in the game although at closer look many of them resemble each other quite a lot. Some skills can be learned while playing from various encounters, but I'd say the majority cannot and only depend on your race and class (well, pieces of equipment may have skills too which are attachted to them and cannot be learnt but can be used if you are wearing it).
In TOME both the player character and the monsters often feel like glass cannons (excluding some classes like magical shield archmages and enemy bosses although even the final bosses can be two-shotted with the right combination). If you can take the first couple of big hits from the monster before those skills go on cooldown (= period one cannot use that ability) chances are you will win. On the other hand, if you go into a fight without shielding/healing, even a berserker can get killed in just a few hits from a dangerous mage monster. You can build insanely damaging combinations/temporary buffs which are key to victory on characters like rogue. And I'm talking about something like +300 % - 1000 % effective damage output (maybe even higher) compare to just a normal bump attack! Not all monsters are dangerous and you will be fighting pretty basic things like slimes and spiders for the majority of the game mixed with the more dangerous type of monsters.
Rare/unique monsters are one of the best and the worst of TOME 4. They are monsters that get random class abilities in addition to their monster abilities. This can lead to a single piece of mold suddenly becoming a life-threatening challenge to your character. There can be wacky combinations like an undead Sun Paladin and they can fun to deal with but on the other hand they can be a horribly unbalanced death sentence and (effectively) one-shot you character. Also there are status effects. A lot of them. Check the TOME wiki and spend the next 15-30 minutes reading.
So, there you have it! Like I said in the beginning I'm really enjoying this game. However, it can sometimes be a very frustrating one too -and for all the wrong reasons, unfortunately.