Offers quite the challenge, I like that. I noticed in a comment that you were thinking about adding other classes. My two cents: since the skills with no skill-book are ranged and fortitude, you could add some classes based on at least those two. Like an archer and maybe some sort of an self-buffing/healing book.
I've seen people already commenting a lot on the warrior and the rogue classes being too hard, so ill just chime in on that. What I haven't noticed people commenting about is the lack of an ice magic skill; this way you can't upgrade your ice-magic skills in your ice-magic book, if you happen to find one.
Thanks for making an awesome time-sink!
Reviews for "Rogue Fable II"
Auto explore, level maneuver through the minimap, same equip = equip +1(＊), branched maps which keeps replays interesting, cool artifacts like telepathy, DnD-like god worshiping, environment reactions (limited but well made), so many fun things/nice design put together, well done!
＊:But as AllenChan below mentioned, it is bugged.
BUT:
1.Why can't I sell things to the merchant? In some runs I got so many darts and extra equips I really'd rather just dump them.
2.Why can't the mushrooms serve as food? There are also instances where I got so many mushrooms, but I could hardly find a pork chop.
3.How exactly do you level up? It seems sometimes I pick up money or items and I level up. I'm confused.
4.Only by accident did I realized detailed status effect descriptions will be shown if you move your mouse over the status text at the top left. Consider this Not a good UI design.
On a similar note, isn't "Spell Damage" a bit ambiguous? I know I can check the result at the stat summary, but just reading "Spell Damage" does not give enough information on first sight (Is it Take spell damage or Deal spell damage?)
5.This probably is going to be mentioned by only so few of us: Why did you cancel the Ice Mage class? Too powerful or sth? Hmm...Freeze and Freezing Wind sure are cool (Not going to reveal how I find that here but I am using it in-game heehee.)
6.Are you sure it is possible for all classes to finish within 45 minutes? Even with "a certain help" (ahem) my single run time still went beyond an hour. 45 minutes in such a setting where rushing will easily get you killed just feels impractical. Of course if you or sb in your test team did manage it, well, consider this irrelevant, I am an absolute noob when it comes to Roguelikes.
Wouldn't it be nice IF:
1.Rogues have some more skills? (Pick lock? Bombs? Traps?)
I understand he is just not set up with combat nor exploration in mind, it could be interesting. For now it looks like the only way to play is go completely stealth.
2.There are some other extra environment interactions?
Bombs destroying walls/locked doors, showing hidden rooms?
Forming strategic bottlenecks (from the debris it creates)?
3.Teleport's "Any visible tlie" actually mean "Any tile you've already explored", not just "The tile your sight can reach" ? (Jumping a few tiles away from a swarm of enemies doesn't make much difference in most cases...)
That's all I can think of for the moment.
Great game!
it's a quiet nice game where you can loose yourself an hour or 2 in to test out all charackters and learn the gamemechanichs
my personal opinion about charackter strength from strongest to weakest is
1 nekromancer
2 fire Mage
3 lightning Mage
4 Knight
5 Rogue
i never got past lvl 12
and im a bit too frustrated to keep trying any longer.
my problem is the randomness off events, where walls explode for no reason and open the way for 5 additional enemys wich directly get pulled aggro on the player in situations, where he/she already is fighting with 3-5 other enemys, the pure ammount of enemys in this situation is too overwelming, that there is no way to survive it.
i have no clue how to survive longer than 5 stages with the knigt and the rogue class, when you realy try to clear out the entire stage before you keep progressing to get as mutch xp as possible before the next stage begins, at a certain point, you run out of health potions with the melee classes and that's when the GG appears. the charackter abilitys of those classes are so weak, that they only are playable when you use the random throughable items you'll collect in the stages. best bet to make it as far as possible is to use the poison attack of the necromancher, while holding distance to the enemys, with a bit luck, you'll find ability books of the fire mage to combine the explosive damage with the poison dot ( fire and oil)
the lightning mage is weaker, cause there are less situations, caused through map desings, where you can use advantage of electrodamage via AOE combined with Waterpits and again... Randomness! you want to play a class where you can count on in every situation.
i think the rogue class isn't ment to xp a lot, might be allmost easier to avoid all enemys with it, than trying to lvl up the class for map progress.
JustinWang123 responds:
Thanks for the review!
Its odd, some people (myself included) find the warrior very easy. Other people seem to find him a challenge. I'd say that's a good thing as it implies maybe there's some special play style required to play him that not everyone has figured out that once learned makes him easy. This 'special play style' is how I'd like the classes to be balanced. Rogue is universally considered underpowered and possibly even unwinnable (though some have won with him). I'll be working on updating him in the coming weeks.
I find the warrior works well by really pushing his fortitude up, granting him a ton of hitpoints. Then every time you level your getting healed to full with larger and larger hit point reserves. Personally I try to avoid using potions and mushrooms as much as possible and just focus on timing my level ups and fountain usage. Since level ups, fountains, food and potions all heal based on your max HP, the warrior essentially has the highest healing rate in the game as well as the highest hit points.
The rogue as I envisioned him is definitely supposed to avoid combat if possible. I'm toying with the idea of granting him exp for unkilled enemies whenever he descends stairs to pretty much completely encourage true stealth play. His powerful sneak attack then comes in only in situations you can't sneak past. This is something I'll be working on in the next few weeks.
Great game. Great replayability. Storm and Fire mage are just challenging enough to complete the game. The other classes are too under powered in my opinion.
I think I encountered some bugs.
1. When I own a robe and pick up a robe, the robe which I own becomes +1 automatically.
But if I own a robe, and I buy another robe from the vendor, the robe does not +1 so basically a waste of gold.
2. I've encountered maps where there is a door at the edge of the map which opens to nowhere.
Side comment:
It's almost impossible to play as warrior and rogue. Melee just doesn't cut it.
JustinWang123 responds:
Haha, I'm getting so many mixed signals on the relative strength of classes from people. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on what classes are OP and which are under powered. The rogue is definitely a consistent problem that I'll be looking into fixing up.
1. I'd say that's not a bug, you just chose to buy a weaker robe but I understand how that could be confusing since the game always drops a better (mod) item then you currently own. Maybe as a middle ground I could just have the merchants loot behave the same. They always have a better item then you currently own.
2. That's one I've never seen or heard reported. If it happens again please take a screen shot of this misbehaving door so I have some clue as to the circumstances.
Hehe as to my comment to the below post, half the responses I get say the warrior is the strongest, half argue the opposite. Rogue will be getting a big overhaul at some point.
I'd like the rogue to not actually be powerful but to focus more on avoiding combat, sneaking past encounters, looting the entire level and then continuing. Stopping to fight only when needed. This will need a big change to his skill set and possibly how stealth works to achieve. I'm even considering giving him experience when he goes down the stairs for every unkilled, non-respawned enemy so that there is basically no incentive to kill, only to loot items. I want to try to get him to play differently from the other classes so that not every characteris just a variation on 'kill everything that moves'.
Thanks for the review and feedback!
I absolutely love this game. The mechanics are great, they could probably be tweaked a bit but I really love everything about it. The only reason I gave it 4 stars is some unavoidable glitches.
I was just killing it as a fire mage, and after I cleared floor 12 I clicked to go to floor 13 and the game froze and would not respond. I couldn't even reload the save and had to start over.
This most recent time I went down into floor 9 which was the sewer. I cleared it, but there wasn't any stairs to floor 10. I went back up to floor 8 thinking maybe I was in an extra area, but no such luck. I'm stuck! Hope you can fix these problems because I do love this game, I've given it a lot of time over the past few days since I've discovered it.
JustinWang123 responds:
Thanks for the feedback. Both bugs are on the todo list and will be fixed as soon as possible.