DUNGEONS OF CHAOS

I've played way more of this on Switch than I have on PC. It's very good. It's almost like entry level Tales of Maj'Eyal. That's the best way to describe it. It does fill its own niche though. I like everything about this game.

It really tries to be reminiscent of old pc rpg's like ultima, avernum, but ultimately fails slightly in so many ways i would instead recommend playing the old games it takes inspiration from. There are some things this game does well. It looks fine, maybe some people will be turned off by the very simple retro pixel art, but i like it, everything is instantly recognizable, magic items look cool, i have nothing to say against the graphics. Music is mostly background noise, but it's not in any way grating. The story is very basic, maybe it throws some curveball in the later chapters, but so far its a simple, classic plot, which, while not groundbreaking, is enjoyable, and gives me a reason to play. But the gameplay dies a death of a thousand cuts. The game heavily borrows from past titles, but doesn't stand on the shoulders of giants, it makes the same mistakes over and over again. Character creation and stats are confusing, some stuff is explained, but some stats remain a mystery as what do they exactly do. I'm sure i could figure it out with a piece of paper and some math,, but i don't really see the benefits of not simply giving me %chance to hit an enemy, and instead obscuring it behind 8 different numbers. Things like showing how much damage a spell does, and why? forget it! Your spell leveled up! how much more damage does it do? it says it deals "more" damage! thanks game! Most of the skills and effects are similarly cryptic. As are all other tactical options. Taunt "lowers defense and speed". By some amount, i presume. Changing my attack style from "aimed shot" to "quick shot" gives me "speed++" but it also gives me "accuracy-", very helpful. After a while, this kind of pointless obscurity becomes grating. I don't need to have everything calculated instantly, but at least give me data needed to figure it out somehow. The entire combat systems runs on a sort of an action point system, where cetrain actions take different amount of time, but you never get exact numbers. Do i cast many fast spells or a big one that takes longer? The only way to figure out which is better is trial and error! Leveling and skill system is also plagued by a terrible problem, you get talent points you can put either into the 2 main stats, STR and DEX, or you can put them into skills and spells, BUT, you can also just grind out the skills by using them in battle, but very, very slowly. This makes the mathematically best play to put all the talent points in stats, and grind the skills by killing millions of rats. I know i should just level up my spells with talent points instantly, but the fact that it is clearly the suboptimal path feels terrible, but grinding a skill i can use once a day and i have to use it about 300 times to level it up feels ever worse. You can also put talent points into upgrading items, but the game uses a random prefix-suffix system, so there's a very fair chance that you use up 10 levels worth of talent points on upgrading your gear, and the next skeleton you kill drops something infinitely better, and you aren't getting those levels back. The dungeons, which are a big part of a game called "dungeons of chaos" are very hit or miss, some, like ch1 lich's lair, are very fun romps through a tower full of undead, with some light puzzles and secrets, and a cool boss at the end. Some, like an abandoned mine with a dragon in the same chapter, took me a real life hour to explore the winding dead ends, which ended in a fight with 1 enemy and a pile of loot. A lot of the dungeons are like that, full of dead ends and mostly empty, but you still want to explore each nook and cranny, because one in twenty has some cool loot or a secret boss. It's not a good design and made me want to skip everything after that, loot be damned. Ui feels dated on purpose. People have figured a lot of neat tricks that make turn based rpg fight move more smoothly, and this game uses none of them. Everything takes just a little bit more clicks than it has to, you have 9 quick slots for skills, while classes like the wizard can have like 30 spells or more, and if you want to use something not in the quickslots, you have to go through a grueling journey through 6 different menus, to rearrange the quickslots, and only then you can use the skill. Some parts of the game seems unfinished, i talked to a vendor, clicked one of the options made a popup appear explaining that this is an option for items that aren't in the game "Yet". I'm not holding my breath. Overall, the positive reviews i read promised a game that's deep and functional, and i can see the skeleton of that game, but so many little things seem very unpolished badly designed at the core level. I really liked chapter one, i had fun developing some strategies that seemed to work through trial and error, but in the middle of chapter 2 i just had enough of the small and medium errors this game keeps making. I can see this was an hones passion project, but i think i'd rather replay the old games it's inspired by