How on earth did 100 Rogues get good reviews? It’s got pixel art that is, while not to my taste, relatively charming. There’s a humourless person’s impression of ersatz Monty Python humour (the monsters in particular might as well be wearing T-shirts saying “Aren’t we zany? Isn’t this so funny? Look we’ve clown enemies in hell, we’ve babies with wings! We’re kooky? Aren’t we? Please?! Mommy thinks I’m funny and she’s a woman and she touched my arm once, so I’m not a total loser, right?” Admittedly fitting that on the iPod screen would be difficult). It more or less controls alright (mainly because interaction is so simple) but almost everything else is shallow, broken or terrible.
The game really tries to talk up its roguelike difficulty - even the feedback soliciting message reads something like “Win or lose (more likely lose) we hope you enjoyed playing” - yet I played four games in total, died near the end of the 4th floor in the first and then got to the final boss in the remaining three games, winning the last one.* And I’m hopeless at roguelikes. The only other roguelike I’ve finished is Shiren DS and in Dungeon Crawl I’m more likely to choke myself to death trying on a fancy-looking necklace than reach the Orc Mines.
I played a Crusader, a class which seems totally unbalanced. There are essentially two skill branches you can follow when you level up: investing three skill points (you are awarded one every odd level) in one tree gives you the ability to wear heavy armour and wield axes; in the other, two skill points will give you a pretty good heal spell and another skill point will upgrade it enough to heal about half your total hit points. Which sounds like an interesting trade off, except that there are only three types of armour, all of which you will see multiple times in a single game and using only two enchant armour scrolls** will upgrade the middle tier armour (chainmail) until it is better than the top tier armour (plate) for which you need to invest all those skill points. There are three armour stats - effectively defence, magic defence and evasion. Plate armour has a defence of 47 and 0 for the other two stats; chainmail upgraded twice has 45 defence, 10 evasion and 8 magic resistance and so is inarguably superior.
The heal spell on the other hand costs twelve mana regardless of how much it’s upgraded. A crusader will have around twenty mana by level 3 and the balance of damage taken versus time for mana to recharge is such that from floor 4 to the end boss there was never one moment in my final three games where my health dropped below half its maximum, despite not having access to axes. I never once had to rest, though I once did so accidentally by holding the Skip button too long. In the last dungeon level, one of the enemies teleported me into the middle of a room with two (allegedly) tough melee enemies, one spellcaster than can summon a new enemy every turn and one spellcaster than can temporarily diminish the player’s armour - I didn’t even need to move away, I just stayed in the centre of the room and killed everything, as if I were a frenzied Batman wielding a chainsaw in a roomful of newborn puppies.
Then there are the unforgiveable “puzzle” bosses. There are 2, plus the final boss. By far the worst is the priest on level 8 (the game calls him a Pope, but it can’t be as I assume fighting the pope might actually be interesting, as long as it were the new evil Pope). He’s protected by a shield maintained by enemies standing on four switches - can you figure out how to beat him? Of course the enemies that stand on the switches will spawn infinitely, so you need to kill one, stand on the switch and shoot until the boss dies. Each turn the enemies were able to reduce my healthy by up to four of my fifty hit points. I’m assuming no-one is reading this, because (as well as being an insanely long and boring read) it takes roughly 8 billion years of tapping on the boss before he dies, so I imagine the Universe is actually finished now, and everyone’s gone home. I’ve written a letter to my computer manufacturer complimenting them on my PC’s durability.
The further you get in the game, in fact, the slower it plays since you get more monsters with lengthy, unskippable animations. Admittedly they only take a few seconds each, but when you go into a room and attack a monster with a sword only to have to wait as the clown does its summon spin… then the ghost does its debuff dance… then the thing I think is meant to be a gym teacher shouts “Nerd” and throws a dodgeball (which absolutely is so still funny when you’ve fought 20 of them on each of the three levels in which they appear - clearly no one ever told the developers that even a good joke will be killed if you repeat it enough)… well, perhaps it’s clear why I’ve written 70,000 words excoriating a game that cost me less than £1.
I was either very unlucky with the random number generator or there are too few items - in two of my four games I got a very powerful sword with a fancy name I now can’t remember, amongst other seemingly unique stuff - and in all four games the same items, potions, armours, wands and weapons kept showing up over and over. The mini-map overlays the level quite nicely - except in the final third of the game, where the faint blue colour of the map is almost completely obscured by the rich brown and orange of the tileset. Food isn’t a problem: in my second last game I finished while carrying two items worth 65 food points each and three worth twenty each and maximum food is only 100. Of course food also isn’t a problem because there’s a bug that causes your hunger to stop declining. There’s also a bug that causes the game to crash if you try a challenge twice (sometimes at least), a bug that exits the game after the second boss fight (saving my progress thankfully, or I would now need a new iPod).
It’s almost a cargo cult of rogue-like design. There are potions of health and wands of teleport, there’s a hunger stat, there are bats and skeleton archers, there are shops where you can buy but not sell. Death is permanent, levels are (with the exception of the bosses) random, you level up, you uncover the map. But the developers have no idea how to put these things together.
Or in short, I didn’t like this game at all. Am I missing something?
- I would have won on my third attempt but I accidentally registered two key presses in quick succession and the boss got in a hit I wouldn’t otherwise have allowed to land. Because deleting an app from the iPod is not particularly cathartic, I put it on easy and raced through to defeat Satan at a fairly low level 13. All the numbers and examples I mention are true for a normal difficulty game, however.
** (which are ridiculously common in game and ridiculously cheap in the ridiculously frequent shops)
