Reviews for Rogue Fable II

[Nezul]

Great little game you have here!
Im a big fan of rogue likes and this game certainly scratched that itch.

I would consider this rogue a little harder than your modern rogue likes, and this is for a few reasons.

1. leveling barely makes a significant dent in terms of your characters ability. 5%- 10% increase in damage? while plausibly significant the fact that gear specific to your class drops so rarely that it is more or less your primary way or increasing DPS throughout the game...its just too slow to save you once your hit stages 4-5 where enemies have 20+ health. the player can maybe handle that one at a time..but rarely will they be give the space to do so.

2. The fact stamina/mana does not recharge..makes it a very rare resource that one cannot constantly rely on. mages might have incredibly powerful moves but the fact they can only be used in niche situations makes them less of a "in case of emergancy" move and more, "im lucky these monsters lined up the way they did". in one run as fire mage I had a crappy staff and a few good swords so I was forced to rely on fireball for almost every kill in the later levels...obviously my resources buckled eventually.

3. Im not sure if this is intentional but entering a new floor past floor 2 seems to spawn you in the middle of a room surrounded by enemies. it takes nearly all the resources you have to get through it. if you dont have the resources to blast/tank through 5-6 enemies at the same time...you just die. this occurs every subsequent floor.

4. there is no way of increasing player speed that I am aware of...I notice you can outrun some enemies but most of the time...you just have to tank the damage if you find yourself in an awkward position.

5. A hunger meter and re spawning enemies is rough. it discourages the player to spend too much time exploring and enemies dont give enough experience to really justify sticking around...however if the player if back tracking to a health or energy pool to prepare for the following floor and then they run into a strong enemy or two it can really hurt. not sure what these mechanics add to the game.

Suggestions
1. critical attacks on unaware enemies dont seem to do that much. its rare you will have a ranged weapon strong enough to do significant damage but with melee characters, its much harder to sneak up on enemies to strike them. maybe make criticals to 3x or 5x base damage instead of x2 or make it easier to do critical?
2. perhaps to sort out the slow DPS increase make more gear drop? I had a million darts that usually missed but I dont think I every ran into a single staff through my play throughs.

I found this quite hard (although thats not to say I didnt still love it! ^_^) I look forward to any future polish you might add

JustinWang123 responds:

Thanks for all the feedback!

I basically agree with all your points though I'd argue that's where the challenge comes from. The game is significantly shorter than the major roguelikes so I feel like that balances out the difficulty somewhat.

I was trying to compress all of those 'critical moments' you come across in say a 10 hour game of DCSS into a short one hour game so that every fight is reasonably meaningful.

There are in fact speed boosting items in the game, a ring and boots, but they are rare.

Food is one of those things I went back and forth on. Generally I've tried to balance it so that its not a problem unless your trying to grind enemies on a level. Its there to encourage the player to keep diving. Merchants have guaranteed food to offset any bullshit in the random number generator.

I'm planning at least for the rogue to have their stealth skill boost the amount of damage they do with melee weapons when making a sneak attack so this may address your first suggestion.

I've personally never had much of a problem with the DPS your describing, so I'll have to wait for more people to comment if they have the same issue.

Thanks again for all your feedback, will definitely take it all into consideration for future updates and balancing.

[marshallbruno]

This game is addictive as heck. I will say that the difficulty is a bit hard; I saw elsewhere that you said you feel it is correct, but I think that in the early dungeons it can be a bit too tough sometimes. If my goal was simply get to the stairs, I could do that, but I like to clear the entire level, which may be something I need to consider not doing I guess? I mean, I get that rouge-likes are meant to be replayed, but I also enjoy beating the game, or at least progressing quite a bit before having to restart. As an example, if I stumble onto a patch of water on Floor 1 and meet a Storm Enemy, I'm essentially effed, regardless of how much HP I have, it just kills you so quickly. Since no buffs are saved after dying, I don't feel like I progress much. Having some sort of persistent upgrades would be nice. (hell, even having a persistent mute option would be nice :P )

I don't quite understand the Food mechanic; It also seems that Killing enemies doesn't give XP, but picking up Gold does. I feel like killing enemies should definitely be giving XP.

Overall I really do enjoy this game and think with a couple minor tweaks it could be awesome. I'll keep playing, but hope to see updates coming down the line!

JustinWang123 responds:

Thanks for the review! Updates are definitely coming. The difficulty can certainly still use some minor tweaking. I say its pretty close to correct because hundreds of people have won already with every class (kongregate allows stat tracking so I can stalk peoples success rate lol).

I don't want to just keep making the game easier in response to players wishes otherwise eventually it loses all challenge and that's sort of the point of roguelikes. Persistent upgrades are also something I'm unlikely to ever implement for this same reason of maintaining the challenge level. I want a victory to be meaningful, to be an achievement only the most skilled and dedicate players achieve.

Persistent mute button though, that's something that's sorely lacking. I know I always have to fumble to turn it off every time I start the game.

Both killing enemies and picking up items grant experience.

Thanks again for the review. Please feel free to PM me with any further thoughts or comments.

[BlackRainEntertain]

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.

[Tsukuru]

This is seriously fun to play, but especially with a class that's weaker in HP, in the later levels, I find the difficulty ramps up so high that I just spend energy and consumables till I die. : /
In essence, great game, but it feels like I'm not supposed to win.

[mastertmack59]

fun game. raised my necromancy pretty high, but was still only doing 4dmg to enemies.