First things first: is the game casual, hardcore, somewhere in between? It's fairly sophisticated in terms of mechanics, but it lacks the baroque interface and display of the older roguelikes. THere are a lot of possible character builds- you chose 7 for your character at the start of the game from a total of 34 options. There are a lot of bonuses, statistics, resistances and suchlike crunchy numbers to tweak and ponder over, at least as many as Crawl. Item interactivity is much less than Nethack (then again, so is every other game in existence) but perhaps more involved that crawl. The ascii and the keystroke commands found in older roguelikes, and the many pages of inventory and character info don't really bother me that much, but I have to admit it's kind of nice to be able to see everything in my inventory, get a description of it by mousing over it, and to drop it, equip it or consume it with a single mouse click. I feel that nothing is lost with the graphic interface, and a lot is gained.
As for things that might make you decide whether you are interested in this game, I'll begin with stuff that it does not have:
- No starvation. Food is important, but you cannot starve to death. You do need it to regen health at a rate approaching survivability, however.
- No scrolls. I think. You do not need to ID anything. There are ways to enchant objects or switch out objects for other objects, however, and these involve skills or dungeon features. There are plenty of wands, potions and other consumables however.
- There is no real religious system, in the sense of what you have in Crawl Adom or NetHack. Look on the bright side, however, there is also no piety farming or annoying alignment system. The only thing you sacrifice at an altar in this game is lutefisk, but that's really just a dungeon feature than a character build choice.
- The game does not calculate encumbrance based on weight. You do have a limit on what you can hold in your inventory however, and like items stack.
- THe game does not have a sophisticated system for implementing time; everything seems to take exactly one turn.
Things it does have:
-Skills and spells galore. In general, these can be classified as passive or active. Active skills either use mana (ie spells), or sometimes have a time delay for recharge. A lot of skills can affect the dungeon environment (you can TK push furniture, or kick it around with a martial arts skill).
- An extensive crafting system. THe crafting itself is pretty simplistic, just put stuff in a box and push the button, however the crafting skills pair well with one another and other skills not related to crafting. For instance, if you have tinkering skill you can make some pretty spiffy crossbows and ammo, or bombs for throwing, etc. Alchemy can supply useful components for tinkering traps, and so on.
- Plenty of effects seen in other roguelikes- sleep, stun, knockback, blindness, burning, poison, etc. etc. Also resistances to go along with these.
- Extensive item management- you actually have to have ammo for your crossbows, etc.
- Shops, which I do believe can be stolen from with the right combination of skills and cunning.
- Wacky dungeon features such as shrines, fountains, bookshelves (they give you crafting recipes), etc. etc.
I think it's pretty fun; it's too early to say if it will achieve the pure awesomeness of Crawl, but I think it's worth the <$10 price tag, and a worthy entry into the genre. THere's still a lot of balance tweaking going on.
As for the people who can't stop whining about the silliness of the art or text descriptions, get over yourself. Seriously, you give a fuck if someone out there wants to try and be funny? THere's no reason to be so serious in roguelikes, this is a game about stat crunching, chopping up monsters and looting shit, and in fact I can't think of a single major roguelike that isn't loaded to the gills with silly stuff.