Monday 19 March 2012

7DRL Review Roundup! Warden

Warden by Michal Walczak

Available here


OK this next roguelike is written in python with libtcod and as such it looks clean, pleasant and works as you would expect. The plot is very loosely based on a piece of lore from Dragon Age: Origins, so you are a grey warden going into a dungeon at the end of his time to take down as many monsters as you can.

And goodness me there do seem to be quite a lot of monsters here! Not Vicious Kobolds level of monsters, but still quite a few. We are a powerful @ indeed!

The main mechanic is a little tricky to work out. You have a stamina bar and a power bar. The stamina bar seems to decrease gradually as you move about and increase when you beat up monsters. Usually when it hits zero you get a purple message about stuff taking a toll and it goes back up to 70, but sometimes you die. I'm not quite sure what's going on there, to be honest. As for the power bar, I didn't really take much notice of it.

The gameplay is simple: a maze of passages and rooms, lots of monsters, one "artefact piece" per level that you have to retrieve before you can descend into the sultry "O". Sometimes there is a helpful potion that does something to one of your bars. Something positive I think.

I've really got nothing against this game. It's fine for what it is. I'm just a little disappointed with the fact that it didn't really have a gimmick of any kind so the gameplay is a little boring. This is the author's first game though and he has managed to create a roguelike which feels like a roguelike and works, which is more than some people have managed who finished games this year, so congratulations for that and I hope next year he enters again to build on this success with a game with more of a unique feel rather than a libtcod demo.

Lastly I was a bit disappointed too that you can't move diagonally. Also there could be a bug with the high scores (see below) as I seem to have got one game entered twice.


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