Various Thoughts

While the game has several extremely annoying bugs, for the most part it’s a fun (if repetitive) dungeon crawler.

There’s all the multi-character persistence and loot of a Diablo-like game, with the turn-based and environmental traits of a Dungeons of Dredmor-like game. There are two unique aspects here. The first is that instead of doing one run/character at a time, you have immediate access to 7 characters (one of each class) which share loot and can be used at will. The second is death; if a character dies they get captured and have to be rescued by a different character.

At the moment I have all 7 at levels 10-12 and have just reached the 11th dungeon. So far there’s decent enemy variety (each odd dungeon number introduces new ones) and skill variety (though I’ve only found 2 non-starter ones at the moment), but having to repeatedly grind the same area (even with the randomized layout) to overcome sudden difficulty spikes is annoying. Particularly since any time you fail to clear a level for any reason (death/capture, bug, menu exit) any items found/used or changes made since entering it are completely reset.

I mentioned bugs earlier, and here are some of the ones I’ve run into:
– Doorways becoming impassible after attacking through them.
– Traps killing an enemy and making that square impassable.
– Frozen movement when attacking crystals with a ranged skill.
– The first page of the shared stash wiping itself on game exit.
– Losing items transferred to a character with a full inventory.
– The ‘consumables are 25% stronger’ roulette effect doing the opposite.
– The ‘+1 move’ roulette effect actually doubling movement range.
– XP skill books behaving oddly.
– Entering a Boss level drains all of your money.

Aside from avoiding those issues above there are a few other things to be aware of:
– Do the first dungeon at least once with each character to get all the starter skills.
– Run through it a few more times to hit level 3 and stock up on potions
– Ice Slab is insanely good.
– Skills can be added/removed to/from any non-captured character.
– Weapon skills won’t work with 0 Durability weapons.
– The random ‘destroy all crystals’ objective is extremely difficult.
– There tends to be difficulty jumps every 2 levels.
– Exit via the Esc Menu immediately if it looks like you won’t be able to finish a level.