Ok, so there have been a number of new commercial roguelike and roguelike-like games coming out recently, mostly on desura, and quite a few of them have been appearing in bundles, so I thought I’d start reviewing them, if only so that you can save your money and play soup. Perhaps also it will discourage some people from charging money for games they really shouldn’t be charging money for.
game: Dark Gates
available on: Desura
Version reviewed: 0.40 alpha
in bundle?: yes, http://indiebundle.org/the-hellish-dungeons-bundle/ $7 for 5 games.
price: £6.99 but 30% off as it’s in alpha
review score: 2/10
You start off by having to pick 6 adventurers to send into the dungeon. They have different weapons and different what looks like number of spells and different stats. You immediately notice that the graphics are of the hand-drawn and not that good variety. The desperate, melted faces look up at you, pleading with you not to send them into the jaws of death. “Never mind!” I happily tell them, “At least your face won’t get any more messed up if someone swings a sword into it or throws a fireball at it”.
The really sad thing is that some of these faces are “supporters of the game” who have been immortalized. I bet they are all sitting at home shouting “Oh god, you can keep the money, but please give me my face back! My face! Aaaaah the twisted, melted flesh!”
Once you have picked your six smeary face special people you arrive at the dungeon which looks basically like a roguelike game with tiles, except the player is a representation of more than one person because you’re a party.
You use normal kind of keys to move one space at a time through the normal kind of dungeon. But OH MY CHRIST IT’S SLOW. There’s an animation of the next tile you can see fading in and a little pause. It takes freaking forever to get anywhere. It’s like each step in the dungeon is an event; a momentous occasion that we should sit down and reflect on. You can totally forget about any idea you had of holding a key down and having it repeat. You’re just lucky you don’t have to write an email to the developer each step you take.
There are lots of doors. The doors are designed to slow down the hectic, breakneck pace of dashing down dungeon corridors. You have to select one of your poor melty face saps to more often than not take some damage as a result of opening the door.
Inside a room you might be lucky and find nothing at all. Or there could be an exciting dungeon encounter, such as a bookcase that you choose a MFS (melty face sap- do keep up) to investigate. It will then probably collapse on him or her and cause them to take damage.
If you’re really seriously unlucky then the hp losing event in the room will turn out to be a monster. You can bribe, negotiate with or fight monsters. At the start I tried being all Jean-Luc Picard and negotiating with everything but as so often happens in TNG too, it was a waste of time and you should just attack them on sight. Maybe bribing works sometimes I really don’t want to play the game again to find out.
So: combat. Your six MFS vs. 1, 2 or perhaps later, even more monsters. Baddies please to stay behind line on top of screen; goodies please you stay below line in bottom of screen.
You have a fighting phase and a moving around phase. The only reason to move around it seems is if you can’t reach a particular baddie with your goodie. I really don’t advise moving people around though. It seems you get stuck in a confusing world of moving people and it’s very hard to get out of. I have since learned that there’s a requirement that you fill the front row with your people if you can so that could be it. HERE’S AN IDEA, DEVELOPERS! WHY NOT PUT AN ERROR MESSAGE ON THE SCREEN SO WE KNOW THIS IS WHY WE ARE STUCK IN THE MOVEMENT PHASE! HEY? HEY? USELESS.
Anyway combat continues until either you are all dead, the monster is dead or the player is dead of boredom or self-inflicted keyboard wounds.
Then you move on through the dungeon. You may find stairs, in which case you can descend to another level of the dungeon where different badly-drawn things will feature in the combat section and maybe even different things other than bookcases will collapse on you.
Magic seems not to be implemented yet. It would have made it better I think. Unless the spell effects were hilariously-badly-drawn of course, or the spell animations were tediously long in which case I suppose it could have made it worse. I’m sure they would have found a way to make it worse.
What makes the game even worse anyway is the fact that it constantly just quits. It’s not a crash- it just exits with code -1. Nice. This is not a rare occurrence either- it’s rare to be able to make it to the 2nd dungeon depth.
I think what really annoys me about games like this is what I perceive as the arrogance of the developers who seem to truly believe that what they have created is worth selling. It’s not. Well, commercially it might be, if all the reviews on Desura (a third of which give it 10/10) are not by family and friends. Incidentally, lots of these reviews say things like they are giving it a higher score because it has potential and it’s an alpha and it’s not fair to criticise it too much as it’s not finished. Well, by the same token, it’s not fair to charge money for it either.
The developers of games like this have the wrong priorities. If I had a game in this sort of state, which represents maybe a week’s worth of work (see the many 2013 7DRLs if you don’t believe that, a lot of them are a lot more fun than this game and they are free), then I would carry on working on the basics. I would add the magic system and the items and leveling up or whatever- all that basic stuff. Instead, the developers here have added music tracks, sound effects, annoying animations and so on.
Maybe it’s because the person doing the graphics and the person doing the music are separate people to the ones doing the coding. I hope the graphics dude is, because then you can replace him or her and get someone better. Everywhere, faces would be safe again!
I do feel a bit guilty having a go at the graphics because someone has put work into them and will be perhaps hurt at my comments, but then they are selling this game for a not inconsiderable sum, and I feel I have the right to judge it.
Conclusion:
Bad graphics, slow, irritating animations and gameplay, shallow, simplistic gameplay, very frequent crashes. It is offensive that any amount of money is being asked for this game, let alone the relatively high price they have set.
7 responses to “Commercial RL(L) Review: Dark Gates”
Bartosz Debski
April 21st, 2013 at 23:09
HI, I will not argue or try to defend my game here as this is your opinion. I just want to set few things straight.
1. Reviews on Desura – I personally know only one person from those gamers and none of their scores has been lobbied or forced by me.
2. Art & code has been done by myself and “photo to avatar” you are showing here it’s … me 🙂 hello. Any other avatars made for supporters has been approved by themselves. It’s not fair to ask for money in return for something that they don’t like.
That’s it all, yours truly melted face 😉
graspee
April 22nd, 2013 at 09:54
Like I said, I do feel a bit bad bashing the graphics but they really are not that good. I couldn’t do better myself but I wouldn’t choose to charge money for a game and have graphics like this in it. Also the melted face thing is obviously an exaggeration but that’s just part of the attempted humour of the review.
Look, I’m a roguelike developer who can’t draw. That’s why my 7DRL shown here uses ASCII, and why my upcoming game uses 16×16 sprites. Small sprites are retro and people like them. *I* like them. With a small sprite it’s possible to look at each pixel individually and say should this be here? What colour should this pixel be?
You can see some of my dodgy sprites in the background of my profile on https://twitter.com/graspee
The thing is, I am mainly being so vicious towards your game because you are charging so much for it. If this were a homebrew game on a webpage somewhere that was free then yes, the animations would still annoy me, the graphics would still look bad to me and the gameplay would still be shallow, simplistic and annoying, and the crashes would drive me up the wall still, but I wouldn’t say anything, because it would just be free.
When you decide to put something on Desura with a price tag of £6.99 you are saying your game is worth for example the same as Trine and Conquest of Elysium 3, double what Dungeons of Dredmor is worth (!!!), worth more than Cardinal Quest, etc.
I’m sorry to say, your game in my opinion is not ready to be on Desura yet in its current state, and even if you add lots more content, fix the crashes, rework the interface and so on, it won’t be worth £6.99. A figure of £1.99 would be more realistic.
You are lucky to have so many people saying your game is great and giving it 10/10 and so on in the reviews section. I really don’t know what these people are enjoying about your game.
bledcarrot
January 22nd, 2015 at 00:21
All your other criticisms aside, fair enough, but graphics mean nothing in a game like this. I still play turn based games from the early 90s that have far worse graphics than this. Not important.
graspee
January 22nd, 2015 at 01:14
You can kind of say that graphics don’t matter but on the other hand, bad graphics are worse than ASCII. Also, if I’m paying for a game then I expect it to have pleasing graphics: for them to have spent some of the development costs on the graphics. Good graphics give a game an individual style and flavour and can help with immersion.
Bartosz Debski
January 27th, 2015 at 23:35
Dude, either you really don’t like me (we never met) or you are some kind of jealous that someone like me managed to release a game. You bought this game for $1.4 and got free Steam key out of this. Your reviews are pure trolling either for fun of it or that’s your nature. It seams you have played lest than 20 min and you are pointing Steam users to a review you have made based on alpha version of the game.
I would fully understand your critics if I somehow misguided you or anyone else in any PR content, but I did not. Quick search on YT and you got everything.
graspee
January 28th, 2015 at 18:15
I’m not sure why you felt the need to reply again with a more confrontational tone. Your first reply, nearly 2 years’ ago seemed to be taking my review in good humour. Is it because I have linked to this old review in my steam review and you are worried about the effect on sales or something?
I don’t dislike you, nor am I jealous you got a game on steam. I could have a game on steam if I wanted.
The price I paid for the game is irrelevant: you are selling it for £7 and I’m reviewing it based on that price.
If you think my review is trolling you need to look up the definition of trolling because it’s not “stuff that disagrees with me”.
You have no idea how much I have played your game at all. Steam doesn’t count game time played when a player is offline, and the Desura version doesn’t count game time at all so you have nooooo idea how long I played that version.
The truth is your game is bad. In the steam version right now, latest code, charging £7 for it, not early access, supposed to be finished, you have the following problems:
You can’t use the mouse.
You are forced to use the keyboard.
Your game does not tell people what the keys are.
The user cannot redefine the keys. In my 7DRL I made last year IN A WEEK you can redefine the keys. You have been working on this shit for years and you haven’t got redefinable keys.
One single round of combat requires pressing the Enter key 18 times.
Movement around the dungeon is painfully slow.
The graphics are bad (see Melty Face Criticism).
The game crashes very frequently.
So don’t give me your shit.
Bartosz Debski
January 28th, 2015 at 21:21
Of course I’m worried, you would not be (kind of obvious)? I still say your review is trolling. If you did not point your steam review here with all screenshots being outdated, referring to game being prone to crashes in the review I would not even know or bother to reply. This is not a reflection on version released on steam and that’s why I have replied.
Going back to your points:
You can’t use the mouse.
– yes, so what ? afraid of keyboard ? you forgot to mention it has full gamepad support.
You are forced to use the keyboard.
– see gamepad support,
Your game does not tell people what the keys are.
– all keys actions are displayed on the screen, when you got gamepad connected it switches to gamepad buttons.
The user cannot redefine the keys. In my 7DRL I made last year IN A WEEK you can redefine the keys. You have been working on this shit for years and you haven’t got redefinable keys.
– does your game support Linux ? mine does it from day 1. Not so sure what’s your point exactly. Not a single person (not including you) had a problem with key layout.
One single round of combat requires pressing the Enter key 18 times.
– If you play board games or games with mouse support, do you count how many clicks or dice rolls you make. You just as well can say that you had to press to much keys to do anything in any game. Some like finer detail of control some don’t.
Movement around the dungeon is painfully slow.
– For you slow, can’t please everybody.
The graphics are bad (see Melty Face Criticism).
– You don’t like it, I get it. Melty face still kind of funny.
The game crashes very frequently.
– please do tell me where it crashes. I have sold many copies of the game and so far
nobody complained about game being so buggy as you describe. Since version 0.4 there was a lot of bug fixed (have you seen Changelog ?). Either you are a great in finding them or you have very bad luck.
Lastly price point. I have no obligation to explain myself why I priced my game for what it is. You can’t see value in this game as a whole, makes no difference what price it is.
I will not reply to next post even if you reply. Makes no sense to waste my time to argue with you.