Ziggurat is a roguelike FPS with magic instead of guns. You explore randomly generated floors and fight enemies to get to the next level of the Ziggurat. If you die, you start again from the same floor or from the first floor.
I had a rough start with Ziggurat. The game doesn't have a tutorial or an offline manual to …
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Ziggurat is a roguelike FPS with magic instead of guns. You explore randomly generated floors and fight enemies to get to the next level of the Ziggurat. If you die, you start again from the same floor or from the first floor.
I had a rough start with Ziggurat. The game doesn't have a tutorial or an offline manual to make sense of its mechanics. For example, you have four different types of mana, and you can have one weapon that consumes each type (so four weapons in total). This is an easy one comparable to FPS standards - one pistol, one rifle, one heavy/special, one throwable. The game didn't tell me this - I found it on a random loading screen. Even with that info, I'm not quite sure how mana pools regenerate. Some of it seems automatic, others need to be collected from kills, and there was also some mention about potions I didn't get.
Combat plays out similar to the Serious Sam franchise. Enemies attack in groups and from all sides. You keep strafing away to avoid damage while unleashing a hail of bullets spells. Continue until all enemies in the vicinity are dead. Secondary mechanics such as perks feel incomplete. For example, you get a perk that simply says 'faster attack rate'. Faster by how much? 5%? 25%? 50%? The game doesn't tell you. There are also amulets and shrines that give out buffs. Again, there's little detail on how these buffs affect your character.
Given the confusion regarding the game's mechanics, and my personal wariness for roguelikes, I chose to cheat at this game. The game has a few cheats built in - invincibility, random weapons, reveal map and so on. With those enabled, I finished the main campaign - which has just five floors - in an hour or two. Five floors seems extremely underwhelming even for legitimate players. I remember the Bloody Palace mode from Devil May Cry having 101 floors, and that was a secondary mode within that game.
In summary, Ziggurat didn't work for me. The core gameplay mechanics aren't complex or fun enough to drive a loop within the roguelike framework.
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