I actually wrote a scathing review about this game a while back when I first got it because I was so let down by the gulf between how good it looked and how badly it played. A small mountain of technical issues rendered a promising game nearly unplayable. Support comes really fast, though (it feels like you're playing a beta), and about the time that I was done writing that piece, 100 Rogues became a working videogame and I had to throw the whole damn thing out.
I haven't talked about the roguelike genre here for a really long time, but I love these games. The roguelike is the earliest form of the dungeon RPG: a player ventures into a randomly generated and extremely dangerous dungeon alone. The goal of the game is to venture as deep into the dungeon, kill as many monsters and grab as much loot as you can before dying. Death is permanent: you lose everything and have to start over from the beginning. Rather than the empty feeling of conquering the world at the endgame of many RPGs, this keeps things fresh throughout. The constant risk of death, the way you're constantly scrounging for any little edge you can get, is exactly what makes it exciting.
Rogues owes a lot specifically to the Mystery Dungeon series: it's the same kind of streamlined roguelike that adapts the format to a controller without the excess of very specific keyboard commands. The aesthetic is puposely 16-bit, with really expressive sprites and a soundtrack that specifically sounds like Konami on the SNES in 1993.
But rather than the everyman characters of Mystery Dungeon, we have character classes and skill trees that you're more likely to see in a Blizzard game. This leads to a few distinct classes-within-classes, depending on how you want to play the character. Right now the game has a tank, a magic user, and a thief (who costs $1), so there's a lot of ground covered in play styles. You can play the mage like a thief if you want! It uh, just won't get you very far.
I have a lot of nitpicks about this game, though. It just doesn't come together like Mystery Dungeon does, and a lot of this is on account of a set of items that's still very limited. One of the great things about Mystery Dungeon is that with all the spells (all limited-use) you have on hand, it feels like you have ten different ways out of any given dangerous situation: that fact makes you feel even worse when you die and realize how simple it would have been to get away. There are a lot of cool little points in this game, but it doesn't yet have the same room for creative play as Mystery Dungeon does. I rarely feel like my deaths were my own fault in Rogues: more like the dice fell the wrong way five turns ago and there's nothing to do about it.
In 100 Rogues the items are extremely straightforward, usually just stat buffs, and the distribution feels off too: a lot of the time you'll get a ton of items or equipment that are only of any use to one character class, and since you're not allowed to sell junk back to the merchant (the shop interface is all-around busted as well) items like these have absolutely no reason to be showing up for the other classes. But they do. Items are few, far between, and viciously guarded in this game, and it completely sucks to take out a room thick with monsters to get some crap you couldn't even begin to need. I'm not saying this doesn't happen in roguelikes in general-- the random number generator is a harsh mistress-- but the fact that stuff you can never, ever use shows up in the dungeon is terrible.
The game is fixed and quite playable (I've beaten it once so far), but it's still nowhere near done: the UI is fidgety and often doesn't do what you told it to do, sometimes there will be weird slowdown issues (in a turn-based game!), and each update is riddled with new, minor bugs. It's just that now It should really say (Beta) somewhere on there, cause it ain't done. As a really devoted gamer paying $4, the game's incompleteness doesn't bother me much, but in the iTunes marketplace I don't think potential buyers will be nearly as forgiving. I don't really blame the developers for going the iOS route (it's where the cash is, and roguelikes just don't do well with gamers here), but as a player I think this game would have been better off as a finished, $30 product on a more traditional gaming handheld. It's frustrating to play through a game's developmental growing pains, however small. "You get what you pay for" really shows with this one.
It sure would be nice if Chunsoft gave this market a shot with a Mystery Dungeon game, huh? I saw one of the PS2 Torneko games in the store the other day and didn't grab it because really, I play the games I buy at Book-Off for maybe twenty minutes.
About roguelikes in portable devices. Have you tried POWDER? It was developed as a roguelike for the Game Boy Advance, but is available now in various platforms, iPhone included. I haven't played a lot of it yet (I downloaded the DS version) but so far it does a better job that the Nethack port I tried before it.
http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about
Posted by: Sebastian | January 10, 2011 at 03:53 PM
I just gave Powder a look on the iPhone after your recommendation, and now I'm dusting off my DS. Nice no-nonsense roguelike, I like it a lot.
Posted by: David Cabrera | January 13, 2011 at 07:16 PM
I will admit that I've become teribly addicted to 100 Rogues. I first downloaded it last sumer sometime, but I realy liked the game even then, despite some mechanical issues. I think I have played every revision since then, and it seems to keep getting better and better. I have the most success playing as the Wizard or the thief character. I still haven't beaten the game yet, but I have at least gotten to the Satan level.
Posted by: Karen | February 14, 2011 at 08:54 PM