Now, I'm not that familiar with Rogue-like games, and I didn't
realize what the author was going for until I started. The only
game I can compare this to is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, which is
pretty similar.
This is only a very short demo, mind you, but at the same time, it's
really awesome. The concept of a randomly generated dungeon crawler is
just a really cool and creative idea for the OHR. So even though
this is a demo, I hope the author doesn't abandon it.
The demo is only about 10 minutes long, and even though it has its
fair share of promise, it does have flaws. Little changes can easily turn this into something superb.
The graphics are very bland. The dungeon tiles are quite... well,
they're detailed, but after you see one floor and wall tile, you've
pretty much seen the whole game. If the game is stricly based around
wandering a dungeon and collecting items and getting to the top, then
at least offer the player a little more variety in the scenery. Next, the battle sprites. As said, this is a dungeon
crawler. The idea of having the player weilding his armor and weaponry
is cool, but let's take it up a notch. With some plotscripting, you can
easily make him holding his various weapons in battle, since it looks
really weird for my character to weild a sword when I specifically
equipped him with an axe. You can do so much with this, I'd love to see
you push it all the way!
The battles are a little tough until you come across a spell or an item.
The sound effects are nice (kinda generic, but not a big deal).
Once again, I know this is a demo, so there's no need in me seriouslly
harassing the designer that much. But a bigger variety of enemies would help, and
the floor of the battle backdrop doesn't match the dungeon's floor. Heh.
Now, I'm no plotscripter, and coming up with a script to randomlly
create a dungeon must be pretty tough and take a fair share of
tweaking. I did come across a couple times where a treasure chest would
randomlly pop up outside of a wall where I couldn't get to it. I'd
assume that it would just take some fine tuning to get that to be flawless.
All in all, this whole thing looks quite promising, and you could
really make an excellent and enormous game on this single concept. Make
a gnarly cool boss at the end of each level or something, and if the
player is the persona of the character, let them rename him. Really
flesh this concept out. It would be terrible to see such a great idea
go to waste.
