Incursion: First Attempt.
This game needs work. It's currently at .6, which feels about right. The things that are there are solid, but there's some polish that's just not there.
The inventory structure was annoying. It's worst flaw was my inability to take something from a chest and put it into a bag in one trip to the inventory screen. The second half of this was being unable to simple pick something up into the bag without going to the inventory screen. When I realized you couldn't sell anything, it solved a lot of problems because I just stopped carrying anything.
The second major issue was the pathfinding and general structure. I played a ranger with an animal companion, and was regularly stopped while exploring by 'displaced' messages due to the dog walking over me. He also got stuck in a maze and couldn't follow me out. I was even trapped in the corner myself for a while because, while he could push past me, or push me into adjacent squares, I couldn't push past him.
The manual needs some work, and the wiki is underpopulated. On the other hand, the interface does an excellent job inundating you with information about in game objects, with bolded keywords (This was easily the best part of the game)
The system itself is a lightly modified 3.5 rules set. That is, it's literally D&D. The 'complex' character creation was perfectly recognizable as the normal character creation process for D&D. The OGL was created to sell Player's Handbooks, and to make more obscure genres use a familiar system. I can't say that I think highly of placing the (oversimplified) structure in a video game.
All that being said, it's a solid system that does everything it needs to do for a dungeon crawl game. It's got promise, but I'm done with D&D.
Anyway, Stone Soup is next.
Stone Soup:
Erm, yeah... It did everything right that Incursion is doing wrong, and yet it made me appreciate incursion all the more. It seems like a 2 inch deep game, but the polish is kinda nice. No inventory woes, because there's effectively no inventory. I had a lot of trouble running down corridors by holding the key down, and missing monsters. It seemed that there were some macros for this, but it seemed like work. Poison was bad...
Unreal World next, but it's shareware, which means a limited copy. Blech....
Unreal World: Blech... This is actually a pretty polished game... The UI is a bit awkward, because there were a few times I had trouble getting it to do what I wanted navigating the structure. I think my major issue with it is the frustration of the recursion. You can't plant because there's no fire, but pile all your twigs up, and it tells you that you can't start a fire with this many twigs. Forage? nope, Hunt? nope.... erm... ok, starve? Yup. I think this could be a neat game after some research and a few tries, but it fails on first blush. It's also not really a roguelike, except for the topdown view, random world, and what appears to be easy death.
The final straw was trying to exit the game. The X in the corner was disabled, and it took a few menu keys to get out, all the while playing music. When I finally got to the screen where it asked me to select a language to display the begging for money, it crashed and I had to kill the app anyway.
After these three, I'm going to have to say Incursion is the best of the lot. I can deal with the pathfinding issues (I'll start at no animal companions). The inventory screen has issues, but it seems like a first pass, so I'll be forgiving there to. That leaves the only serious crime as being a literal D&D clone through a questionable application of the OGL license (My interpretation was that OGL stuff from Wizards said you still needed to require the player's handbook, but I could be wrong).
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Topic: looking for games (Read 6017 times)