Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Dungeons of Dredmore

So this morning I was looking for something turn based to play while watching Suikoden on the Crystals for Life stream. I looked through my list of Steam games and saw I'd installed a roguelike with Steam cards a while ago but never actually got around to playing it. Seemed like something to try!

Dungeons of Dredmore turns out to be more roguelike than other Steam based roguelikes I've played recently. FTL and Rogue Legacy both have some really out there twists; Dungeons of Dredmore seems to very much be an enter cave, fight, die game. Nothing is carried over. You're not a space ship. All you can do is try to use what you learned in your last death to make it a little further this time around.

What it does have going for it is the way you build your character at the start of the game. Rather than pick a class like in a normal game you instead pick 7 skills from a list of 35 options and those are the things you get to level up as you play the game. If you want to play a mage you can pick all 7 skills from spells and mana regen options. If you want to play a tank you can pick a lot of defensive skills. Maybe you want to do a little of everything? Just grab all kinds of things! There's even a random option if you want the game to pick 7 things for you.

I haven't played enough to be any good at all, but I am enjoying the different ways of building characters that ultimately die. I think my next guy is going to be a shield bearing, axe wielding, artfully dodging, berserker raging, master of arms, archaeologist burglar. He gets to start with a fedora!

2 comments:

Sthenno said...

That was a real negative for me in dungeons of dreadmore. I start a new game and immediately it wants me to choose a huge number of a huge number of things, most of which sound like jokes. It also seems like they put in a lot of fluff. Having a different skill for every weapon type is fine if you learn them on the fly, but having to pick whether you are going to use a sword or an axe before you start playing it going to be really frustrating with random loot.

Ziggyny said...

Well, mostly what that means is I don't need to worry about parsing 6/7th of the weapon drops. They get vendored if they're not artifacts and get sacrificed for xp if they are regardless of what stats they may have.

It definitely felt overwhelming looking at the list of potential skills, especially since it didn't really tell me anything about what they did. So I just died a bunch to read the skill list!