Topic: Ranking of Roguelikes Master Thread

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of my hopefully long-running series, the Ranking of Roguelikes. It's my attempt to play and rank as many of my favorite genre as I can. For the purposes of this project, I take a very loose view of what counts as "rogue-like." If it has procedurally generated levels and permadeath, it's close enough to Rogue for me. I'm no genre purist and don't much see the point in it. I'm more interested in seeing how elements of a genre can be used in surprising ways.

ETA at the request of the moderators, I'm putting everything in one thread.

With that said, let's talk about a game that I don't think gets proper respect: Has-Been Heroes

Time Spent: Around 13 hours
Cleared main campaign? Completed 5 runs, but didn't complete the entire campaign

Has-Been Heroes is a fascinating experiment, a blend of tower defense and roguelike. You're in control of three washed-up heroes escorting a pair of princesses to school through undead-infested lands. As you travel the map, you come across shopkeepers that sell you spells, chests with better equipment, random events, and battles with the undead.

It has a pretty poor rating on metacritic as of this writing, and it deserves better. It has an extremely steep learning curve. Once you grok the flow of combat you start to make significant progress each run, but I understand why people might have given up before then. Combat is hectic and unforgiving. You can't just spam attacks and win, you have to be careful and and cleverly manage your cooldowns and attack sequence. Enemies attack in three lanes, each one guarded by one of your heroes. Once a hero attacks, you can switch lanes with another hero to continue the attack or position them for another one.

In order to defeat the waves of undead, you have to "break" their stamina. Your heroes have a specific number of attacks they make: the nimble rogue hits three times, the wizard hits two, and the warrior only once. An enemy with three stamina points needs to be hit exactly three times to be stunned, at which point you can hit them for full damage and remove one of their stamina points. If you hit them more times than that, like attacking with the wizard and then the rogue, you'll knock them back slightly and their stamina resets. It's a fast-paced puzzle that demands that you play it on its own terms.

The game does the bare minimum to introduce you to its mechanics. There's a brief combat tutorial, and then you're dropped into the thick of it. You have to learn what works and what doesn't as you play. It teaches you what you need to know by making you engage with its systems. I love this approach, but I understand that it may frustrate others.

Each level ends with a fight against a boss that has some special trick up his sleeve: maybe he constantly summons shades of himself to confuse you and waste your attacks, or sets up totems around the field that you must destroy before you can hurt him. These fights are supreme tests of your skill and cunning, and in the beginning you'll lose them far more often than you win.

Each map has multiple routes to get to the boss. You have to weigh the chances of getting more gold and items against the very real possibility that you won't survive a battle. It's the classic rogue conundrum: stay on the current floor and try to get everything you will need for the later levels and risk starvation and death, or rush for the exit and hope you have enough to survive.

Once you find a new item or spell, you'll have to decide who gets it. This is complicated by the fact that the first time you find a new item, you don't know what it does. You're able to make more educated choices in later runs, but the first time it's a real gamble. Some people will hate this, but I don't. Unidentified items are a staple of Rogue and I enjoy the callback to it.

The heroes' spells offer a lot of opportunity for creative solutions to problems. Spell damage comes in elements of water, fire, ice, and lightning, and those damage types can interact with each other in interesting ways. Get enemies wet and hit them with lightning and it will arc through everyone. Freeze them and hit them with fire, and they'll take extra damage while they burn. I think there are some hints about this on the title screen popups, things like "try different combinations of elemental damage to see what happens," but you're left to discover them through trial and error. Some people will hate this, while others will find joy in the discovery.

There are also quite a few combinations of items and spells that can make a huge difference if you use them properly. For example, critical hits bypass enemy armor and do extra damage, and the rogue has a slightly higher chance for them to trigger. Load her up on extra critical chance, and he can take out weaker enemies in one attack! Add an item that gives bonus damage to melee attacks, and she'll become a lethal assassin. This became one of my favorite builds and was directly responsible for my first two victories.

Each archetype (rogue, warrior, wizard) also has several variants you can eventually unlock. Each one plays quite differently than the other, opening up new opportunities and play styles. There is tremendous depth to the systems and the more you explore them, the more you find.

The one problem is that the game dribbles out new unlocks at a slow pace, and that limits your ability to find and exploit combinations until much later in the game. There are a staggering number of spells and items, but it takes quite a while to unlock them and some are locked behind finishing a run. This makes the early game less dynamic, and that's something that might discourage players from continuing.

Has-Been Heroes is a game that will kick you in the teeth, repeatedly and for no other reason than it can. More than one of my runs ended in humiliating failure after the second battle. I got distracted, or I didn't plan properly, and that was that. These runs did teach me one important lesson: play with attention and intention. Every move you make matters.

It's difficult but not completely unfair. I could always see how I could have done something differently, and in the next run I tried not to make the same mistake. The boss fights are definitely teachable moments. I was rarely able to conquer a new boss the first time I fought them. They're tough puzzles to solve, but never impossible.

The "just one more run" factor is pretty high. Individual runs are relatively short, especially if they end early. It gives you a chance to see more unlocked items and spells and to try different ways of using them. I felt like I understood the game a little better each time, and I was eager to put that understanding to the test.

Where it rank?

It's far more interesting as a roguelike than many out there, even if it suffers in the reviews because of its difficulty. There are some genuinely interesting ideas, and once you engage in it on its own terms you start to see how clever it is. It's not going to be everyone's favorite game, but it's a great example of the genre and something I think more people should give a chance. For now, it's the #1 Roguelike on the list. Congratulations, Has-Been Heroes?

How long will it stay at the top?

Next up: Crown Trick

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Hey, here's episode 2 in this ill-advised dive into every rogue-like and -lite I can get my hands on. At the request of the moderators, I'll keep everything in a single thread to avoid cluttering the forums.

This one is considerably more Rogue than the previous one. It's turn-based, with a top-down grid map and plenty of punishing encounters.

I wish I liked it more than I did.

Time Spent: 7 hours
Cleared main campaign? No, but I completed two realms

Crown trick is an interesting game, a unique take on the top-down, turn based roguelikes of old. It takes a kitchen sink approach to its design: does it work well in another genre? Let's throw it in! Random color-coded loot? Put it in! Permanent upgrades you can purchase with special currency? Put it in! A system for breaking enemy defenses and leaving them vulnerable to extra damage? Put it in! Elemental enemies strengths and weaknesses, and different element effects? Put it in!

A sarcastic and borderline hostile ally that accompanies you on your quest? Put it in! (I wish that developers would retire this tired trope. It's never been clever or fun.)

Crown Trick tells the story of Elle, trapped in a world of nightmares and forced to clear the different realms in order to escape. She's aided by the aforementioned sarcastic ally, the titular Crown. It grants her the powers she needs to survive, and guides her through the various nightmare realms. It's all beautifully drawn and animated, a visual feast of color and personality.
How does it play?

At the beginning of every run, you choose a weapon and a familiar. Every weapon has a unique range, damage, and special effect. For example, guns have a long range and are powerful, but must be reloaded manually once they run out of ammunition. Lances hit two tiles ahead of you, axes hit every tile around you. There's enough variety to accomodate almost any playstyle you prefer.

The familiars are spells that use your limited pool of MP and usually have a cooldown timer. I don't think this is a terribly well balanced aspect of the game. Your MP pool is small and only regenerates when you start a new battle. Adding a cooldown on top of that seems unnecessarily punitive. I would have preferred them to remove MP entirely and keep the cooldown timers. That would have givin you more flexibility and more fun.

You need to defeat a familiar in the dungeon before it shows up as a choice, so you're limited in what you can use until you've had quite a few runs.

Crown Trick also gives you a Blink, a short range teleport that doesn't count as a turn. This lets you position yourself for attacks or escape from danger. Managing its charges is crucial to surviving the many battles you'll face. Healing items are limited and rare, so avoiding damage is vital.
In order to get through each room, you have to defeat the enemies. To defeat them, you have to "break" their defenses. This stuns them and makes them take more damage for a shor time. Each enemy has a "break guage" that goes down by one every time you damage them. You can damage enemies with weapons, familiars, items, or environmental hazards. Breaking enemies is the only way you can regenerate MP or your Blink charges during combat, so it's a crucial part of the experience.

I hate it. There's no design problem that it solves and it only adds time and tedium to battles.

Good rogue-likes encourage experimenting with the tools you're given, leading to unexpected results from using different kinds of items in different ways on different enemies. You're able to solve problems without brute force by being creative with your inventory. Crown Trick doesn't to this. It's all very straightforward and transparent. Fire burns things, electricity shocks, barrels explode, and potions heal. Item descriptions tell you exactly what they'll do. You do have plenty of weapons and spells to choose from, and there are some interesting combinations that make for more or less powerful builds, but it mostly boils down to damage types and attack ranges. I was never surprised by what I tried.

Finally, there is just too much randomness. It's true that this is a staple of the genre, but Crown Trick goes overboard with it: the weapons and items you get are random, and each one of them has a random set of bonuses. The boons and abilities you find are random, and might not synergize well with the weapons you find, or with each other. You can only have one weapon and two familiars at any one time, so there's no way to adjust your tactics if they're not working for an encounter. The vast majority of my runs ended in failure not because I played badly, or didn't understand the enemies' abilities, but because I didn't find a useful combination of things to work with. It's a huge mark against it and ultimately led to me not wanting to continue.

Where does it rank?

This is a mid-tier roguelike with fantastic visual flair and an interesting hook, but it's ultimately not much more than that. I'd have a hard time recommending it over other similar games. There's too many variables to consider, and the excessive randomness makes it difficult to learn from and enjoy multiple runs. It's not the worst, but it's far from the best. I'd rank it below Has-Been Heroes, because it misses or misunderstands some important elements that make games like Rogue so compelling.

Here's the list as it stands:

1. Has-Been Heroes
2. Crown Trick

Next up: Dicey Dungeons

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Episode 3 is here! Today we'll be looking at Dicey Dungeons, a competent if plain entry in the series that others love a lot more than I do.

Time Spent: a little over 7 hours
Completion: Finished first two chapters with each character

Dicey dungeons is roguelike Yahtzee, pitting you against Lady Luck and her dangerous dungeons.

That's as succinct an explanation of the game as you're going to get. You're trying to get to the sixth floor of the dungeon in order to escape Lady Luck. Along the way, you're going to battle enemies by rolling dice and matching them to the abilities you have much like a game of Yahtzee. You pick a path through each floor's nodes, weighing the risks and rewards of each path while preparing yourself for the ultimate battle to free yourself.

While you can theoretically skip battles to save your health, you won't be as prepared for the final fight of each run if you do. Winning battles is the only way to gain levels, and each level gained gives you one more die to roll on your turn. The more dice you have, the more options you have in battle and the more likely you'll get the numbers you need to use your skills. The game is tuned so that you'll reach the maximum level after clearing out the first five floors, and the final fight is on the sixth floor. It's particularly brutal and you'll need every last advantage you can muster.

There are six different classes you can play as, all of whom are some adorably anthropomorphic die version of their archetype. They all demand unique tactics. The Warrior wants high dice rolls to maximize his damage, while the Rogue does best with smaller numbers; the Witch needs to carefully decide what abilities to bring into the field during each battle, and needs the whole range of numbers to be effective; and so on.

In addition, each character has six "episodes" of their story that change the game rules and force you to rethink how you approach everything. Some of the rules changes are quite clever subversions of how you would usually play. There was real thought and care put into each character and episode, and I give the developers a lot of credit for that. They force you to understand and engage with all of the mechanics.

Aside from the different rulesets, the game is remarkably straightforward. You can check the abilities of your enemies at any time, and strategize accordingly. The special effects of some abilities (freeze, shock, burn, poison, and blind) are clearly explained and don't interact with each other in any way. What you see is what you get. It's easy to understand what's going to happen, but once you've seen an enemy or situation you know exactly how to handle it. There are no fun combinations to find or exploit.

You have a limited number of options each turn, and success or failure very often hinges on what you play and in what order you play it. You have a limited amount of money you earn during any given run. You can't buy everything, and you can't equip everything even if you did. Spend too much early in the run, and you won't have enough money to buy more powerful equipment later.
You may also never get a chance in a battle to use that new piece of equipment because you didn't roll the correct number or combination of numbers. This restricts your choice space, and pushed me to rely on a smaller set of abilities and strategies than I would have liked to.

The abilities aren't as balanced as they could or should be. Freeze is absurdly overpowered: it changes an enemies die roll to 1. Since many abilities do damage based on the number on the die or need a certain number threshold to activate, this is almost always the best choice. Shock is a close second, because it locks a piece of equipment and forces them to sacrifice a die to unlock it. Poison and Burn are damage over time, but they were almost completely useless to me in most runs. I could never seem to get enough stacks to be effective at the higher floors.

Enemies follow the same rules as you do, so watching them use their skills helps you understand how to use yours. One painful learning experience I had was about the power of freeze. I lost to a low-level enemy who spammed it constantly and kept me from doing any real damage while she whittled away at my health. It wasn't fun, but it taught me a valuable lesson that I brought with me in all my future runs.

When I failed, I could usually see what I needed to do differently, whether it was using equipment in a different order so that I could maximize the effects of my dice rolls or skipping a difficult fight even though it would have left me weaker for the final fight.

In the beginning, the temptation to start one more run after a failure is huge. You're unlocking a new character every run. You're seeing different enemies, equipment, and map layouts each time. You're experimenting with tactics and learning from your mistakes and your successes.
After a few hours, my desire to play another run after a failed one dropped off a cliff. The novelty had worn off, and I was left with something that just wasn't all that interesting. The randomness of the dice rolls led to too many failures. It didn't feel "tough but fair," it felt unfair.

After I finished a run with each character, I didn't see much value in continuing. I had seen everything that the game had to offer. I know that there must be some sort of "true" ending if you can complete each character's episodes, but I wasn't having the kind of fun that would push me to do it.

Some people love the art style, but I thought it was terrible. It reminded me of 1990s clip-art and the animations were too far into the uncanny valley for me.

Where does it rank?

I'm going to put it at #2, above Crown Trick but below Has-Been Heroes. It's going to be a controversial decision, but I had more fun with it. It shares the same problem Crown Trick has: too much randomness that you can't overcome with clever or skillful play. It's a good game, just not the best roguelike.

The ranking now stands as follows:

1. Has-Been Heroes
2. Dicey Dungeons
3. Crown Trick

Next up: Children of Morta