I don't want it to seem like I'm sniping at the game from a distance, so I'd like a bit of feedback first so I can refine the review. Half the point of posting a review to the blog is to draw attention to the game! Here's draft1:
Over the festive period, there was a fairly major release in the world roguelikes. Tales of Maj’Eyal 4 and T-Engine 4 officially became 1.0, signally the culmination of a 3 year development effort to bring roguelikes to a new level.
"Tales of Maj’Eyal (ToME) is a free, open source roguelike RPG, featuring tactical turn-based combat and advanced character building. Play as one of many unique races and classes in the lore-filled world of Eyal, exploring random dungeons, facing challenging battles, and developing characters with your own tailored mix of abilities and powers. With a modern graphical and customisable interface, intuitive mouse control, streamlined mechanics and deep, challenging combat, Tales of Maj’Eyal offers engaging roguelike gameplay for the 21st century."
Good stuff!
A caveat; it isn't totally Free software. T-Engine 4 is open source, as is ToME4's code/module, but the pimary graphics/tileset is not - usage rights are solely for ToME4.
I've played this a bit more than I'd care to admit to, including several of the betas, and it is an engrossing game. The graphics are nice (in fact excellent by the standard of the genre), the tileset polished, there's plenty of effects and depth and lots of lore.
Sadly the game itself is profoundly flawed. Despite claiming to be against grinding - In the 1.0 release announcement, the author declared, "I have never believed in grinding" - you are required to grind through the early stages of the game over and over. There's a series of easier zones and, despite the apparent freedom in where you can go, if you skip them then you are doomed. It is unavoidable, I suppose, with level-based enemies and skills, but it becomes soon incredibly repetitive.
This wouldn't be that big a deal if the combat were particularly tactical or predictable. You often defeat vast swathes of enemies by holding down a direction key and occasionally lifting it to invoke a healing spell or infusion (another repetitive task; they can be automated but this does leave you occasionally more vulnerable). Some battles, well, the ones you're not high enough level to cakewalk, you precariously fight on as your health jumps repeatedly between near-death and near-full, as you wait for your spells/infusions to become available again. Then, almost unpredictably, you'll encounter an enemy or combination of enemies that you'd sometimes defeat easily if you get off the right first move, and die almost instantly instead. Therefore often combat becomes an exercise in knowing when to be cautious - but frequently you realise too late as your life points drop by huge amounts without warning. Sometimes it's almost unavoidable as you get jumped by large numbers of enemies at once, including boss/magic users, due to the random level generation and enemy placement. With such unpredictable threats, it is not dissimilar to IVAN, except the grinding in IVAN is far less monotonous.
Yes, adventure mode gives you several lives, which would help... except as you try to progress through the game, you are given very little indication of whether you are suited for a particular zone - you have to discover through trial and error (usually death) what level you need to be before you can take on a zone. Then you have to grind your way back to up and try again.
Also the complexity the author strives for is its undoing. There's so many different resistance/damage modifiers (blight, arcane, nature, poison, dark, light, mind, fire, cold, lightening, acid, temporal... a few more?) that some enemies just eat you alive if you're not suitably prepared. Whilst some times this is easy to prepare for, other times it is just totally overwhelming. This usually is because you are often attacked by 20+ enemies at a time, queuing up to have their go - if some of them have differing magical attacks, you can be in deep trouble, again dying in few moments.
You can't really store equipment, and the shop system makes trading in items almost impossible - unless you grind that as well, fetching back every bit dropped to boost your coffers. Playing soon becomes a zombified state of 'Z' and kill and 'Z' and kill etc until encumbered, then go trade back your goods.
Imbued/magical equipment, you quickly learn, is weirdly common - which totally contradicts the storyline ("Spellblaze" and its fallout). The ridiculous difference between selling price and purchase price (a 30-to-1-ish ratio) means you have to collect lots of stuff you don't want in order to bump up your coffers - another form of grinding as you repeatedly make trips back to shops. There are seemingly special items (coloured red) which you can sell for more value. The shops don't change their goods, and if you pick one to sell to primarily, its stock list gets amusingly large. Items are coloured, but I never quite worked out the difference between green, blue, purple, and orange - other than they seemed to be progressively more expensive. Well, orange items are named too? Red ones definitely are named. Yellow items are also named and have lore. Weapons and armours have so many stats that it is tough to really know which to use. The 'power' of weapons seems to carry no meaning whatsoever, as very powerful weapons seem to do far less damage than weapons of little power but a few extra effects. The best indicator of a weapon's effectiveness seems to be its shop value, with an exception for the red/yellow weapons which have inflated prices.
There are other issues - especially with the 64x64 tileset, you are frequently attacked by off-screen enemies if you don't have a huge monitor... I could go on and on.
There's plenty of reading material in the wiki, but understanding ToME4 is unrealistic for anybody not willing to spend countless hours working it all out - I feel I've barely scratched the surface and I've simply had to put it aside as I have a real life to attend to - making this a very unaccessible game despite its pretty exterior. That doesn't mean you won't enjoy it - you will. The lore is well written and entertaining, there is plenty to discover. Just at some point you will have to choose between being sucked in and accepting the gameplay (grinding) flaws whilst making an extra effort to understand the details, or doing something else with the large amounts of time that will potentially consume.
It's really good, but I think will be too complicated an experience for the vast majority of players - which is a bit of a shame given it's graphical finesse and the replay value (near limitless class, skill combinations) compared to most other games in the genre.
Given the capabilities of T-Engine 4, I'll keep an eye out for other games implemented using it.
. Heck, I had forgotten how much of a pain it was hauling items to shops to sell (yes, I used to do that to), because I've had the transmog chest for so long. Some players a long time ago argued they had fun doing this, so it was left in the game. Getting the transmog chest early (or beginning with it) as brought up on another thread seems like a good improvement, and I would also be for not allowing non-gem gear to be sold to shops (of course, if the player begins with the transmog chest, then this is a non-issue).