![]() This looks like it needs to be balanced in future games, so the game at least spawns some food (rotten or not) when the player is critically hungry. ![]() And then you’re stuck, and nothing you can do will save your character from death. But sometimes the game will spawn no food at all. That’s fine too, if it’s a choice between being weakened, and death. And sometimes you cannot find anything but rotten food, which will fill you up, but reduce your maximum HP. ![]() If you don’t eat food, your character dies. The only game play element which seems poorly balanced, and takes some of the control away from the player, is the ‘food’ mechanic. Instead, after every death you’ll always believe that you could have done something differently and survived, and hence the game encourages a ‘one more go’ attitude to playing, and challenge comes off as a positive experience. This isn’t Mario Kart, where the CPU will always cheat at the last moment. However death in any specific situation is never inevitable and the game always seems fair. They explain this by likening the game to Tetris – the goal with your one life is to see how far you can get, not to reach the ‘end’. As mentioned previously, when playing a Rogue-like, you only have one life, no reprieves, and you will die. The game handles the inevitable death of your character well, also. These introduce the player to some of the more complex moves available to them, in an intuitive way (rather than just… telling them) More complex actions are also introduced to the player, through the game’s challenge mode – a series of short scenarios where only the use of an advanced technique (such as ‘tele-stabbing’) will succeed. Crucially, it guides the player through their first steps, and introduces them to the range of actions available to them, by immediately giving them the ability to level up their player, which is reinforced by the low cap for the second level up, allowing the player to practise this mechanic twice within the first 2 minutes of the game. Game play covers the game’s goals, and player’s involvement in achieving these. I gather the developers are working on this though. And I still haven’t been able to get defeat the first boss without the game killing my player after I’ve defeated the boss. The fix for this introduced several new bugs. The first version would crash if the player equipped a shield. This is especially important as 100 Rogues has infamously been plagued with a number of bugs since its release last week. It’s also not QA, and so doesn’t cover bugs in the game. Hence, it’s not a review of the game itself (which I gather is a pretty standard Rogue-like). What this review doesn’t cover is non-usability or player experience issues. I’ve based the review on the heuristic points identified by Heather Desurvire’s paper ‘Using Heuristics to evaluate the playability of games’ This is especially important, given 100 Rogues’ mission of making a difficult genre accessible. This review aims to evaluate the playability of the game, including pertinent usability issues, and the effect this has on player experience. As accessibility is one of their key design goals, a heuristic based playability review seems appropriate. However, 100 Rogues aims to present an accessible Rogue-like, ideal for someone who hasn’t played before. I’ve never previously been able to get into Rogue-likes, having only played games in this genre briefly, before being scared off by the dungeon crawler’s core mechanics of ‘odds stacked against you’, ‘if you die you lose’, and ‘you will die’. In the words of the Fast Show, this week I’ve mostly been playing 100 Rogues.
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