Lair Larrikin
Posts: 25
Joined: Friday, 24th December 2010, 21:00
Other Roguelikes You Enjoy?
I just started playing Tome 4. I had heard of Tome before, and only bad things - it was boring, an Angband variant, not really interesting, a mess of mechanics, and most importantly - boring. So when a forum I frequent had a really quickly growing thread on Tome 4 I got suspicious. Had everyone lost their minds?
Then I tried it. It's slow, runs choppy, it's very long as a whole - 20 or 30 hours start to finish, crashes a lot because it's still beta, the endgame has a lot of stupid instagib deaths; but I'll be damned if the combat isn't the most enjoyable roguelike combat I have seen.
Tome 4 takes a hint from MMOs - each class (and there are some insane classes - like Wyrmic, a fighter who mimics dragons and can spit sand to blind enemies, cause miniature earthquakes which rearrange the terrain, or just outright swallow enemies alive, or several classes built around time buggery) has a number of open and hidden talent trees, which give you different abilities to use in combat. There are a number of resources classes use for these abilities - mana, stamina, equilibrium, hate, paradox - to name a few, and each ability has a cooldown.
The result is you can mix and match abilities within your class to make it as suited to your playstile as possible. There are other things about it which I like (like adventure mode, which gives you more than one life up to a limit so you're not endlessly respawning, which is the mode you should be playing if you're trying it out as I mentioned stupid instagib deaths), but the only reason I go back to that thing is the combat. As someone who had played mainly Crawl for his roguelike fix, having a basic melee class which can rush an enemy crowd to get near, stun one guy, knock the most dangerous target away and then just go berserk and murder everyone around me with AOE is just way too fun. And that's not even mentioning the advanced classes and races which you can unlock.
Your turn Oh, and please don't turn this into "XXX game is just plain better than YYY". I'm more interested in why YOU prefer a game, rather than absolute preferences.