Steam's Early Access is filled with games these days that are annoying to cover due to missing assets, bugs, bad performance and unfinished gameplay mechanics. Only few games out there are worth picking up in my opinion. And I believe Ziggurat is one of them.
Ziggurat by Milkstone Studios is a first-person dungeon crawler, a genre some might also refer to as procedural death labyrinth. You play as a mage apprentice who's sent into the depths of Ziggurat, a labyrinth filled with monsters and deadly traps, to prove himself worthy to become a wizard. You kill enemies, level up your character and gather new spells and mana for those spells to defeat the stronger enemies the labyrinth will throw at you after each level.
Ah, playing this game was truly refreshing. If you have participated in our discussions on the IRC channel, you might already know that I don't really like Early Access games anymore. They are very problematic for me to review and I have to keep repeating the mantra “this game is in early access, you might encounter bugs and they might get fixed eventually” every time I criticize something about the game. Of course there are occasional exceptions to this, like Kerbal Space Program and I think Ziggurat is also one of those exceptions.
Ziggurat really only has a couple of issues and I was positively surprised by the game's current status. In my books it's already good enough to compete with many of Steam's fully complete titles. Even though it's a Unity3D game, it certainly doesn't look like your generic Unity title. In fact, the models and textures look great to me and the visual style is consistent and suits the mood of the game.
Gameplay is quite similar to Binding of Isaac in that you rely on your skills more than RNG or stats and you have to actively dodge the strikes of your enemies. Running at high speeds while blasting the enemies also reminded me of Quake. You get good enemy variety, with enemies that have distinct abilities and attack patterns. And in addition to that, the game takes the procedural nature as far as to randomize which boss you will encounter at the end of the level, so even you never know which sorts of attacks you should expect. The levelling system is also different. You don't simply select a couple of stats to increase and instead the game selects 2 cards (or 3 depending on one perk) and you can select one of them. These cards have either permanent effects like increased mana capacity or they simply restore your mana/health. This allows for interesting situational choices that you can make based on your current mana and health levels.
While there is a lot to praise, I'd like to also highlight some issues I've had with this game. First of all, you can't save your progress. Ever. It's expected to have the game delete your saves after you die, but in this case you can't save at all. The developers said that this is due to the average length of the runs, which are around 50-60 minutes but I don't think that's good enough. I'm a busy person and I can often only play for around 20-40 minutes before having to close the game and do something else. This means that I often have to simply leave the game which means that I won't get new cards to use in future runs that you normally would when you die or complete the game.
Another thing is the performance. Usually the game runs super smooth even with all of the settings maxed out, but in some rooms where there is a lot of water the game might run at unplayable framerates. I guess it's due to having the water reflections turned on, because I didn't have as much problems after disabling it. When the framerate drops to ~5 FPS you have to really think about doing some optimization with your game.
Apart from those two things, the game is really solid and the only thing it needs gameplay-wise is probably just more monsters, rooms and spells and that's about it. It's absolutely one of the best Early Access titles out there, so you might want to consider making a purchase. But keep that saving thing in mind when thinking about buying the game so that it doesn't bite your ankle afterwards.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Ziggurat by Milkstone Studios is a first-person dungeon crawler, a genre some might also refer to as procedural death labyrinth. You play as a mage apprentice who's sent into the depths of Ziggurat, a labyrinth filled with monsters and deadly traps, to prove himself worthy to become a wizard. You kill enemies, level up your character and gather new spells and mana for those spells to defeat the stronger enemies the labyrinth will throw at you after each level.
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Ah, playing this game was truly refreshing. If you have participated in our discussions on the IRC channel, you might already know that I don't really like Early Access games anymore. They are very problematic for me to review and I have to keep repeating the mantra “this game is in early access, you might encounter bugs and they might get fixed eventually” every time I criticize something about the game. Of course there are occasional exceptions to this, like Kerbal Space Program and I think Ziggurat is also one of those exceptions.
Ziggurat really only has a couple of issues and I was positively surprised by the game's current status. In my books it's already good enough to compete with many of Steam's fully complete titles. Even though it's a Unity3D game, it certainly doesn't look like your generic Unity title. In fact, the models and textures look great to me and the visual style is consistent and suits the mood of the game.
Gameplay is quite similar to Binding of Isaac in that you rely on your skills more than RNG or stats and you have to actively dodge the strikes of your enemies. Running at high speeds while blasting the enemies also reminded me of Quake. You get good enemy variety, with enemies that have distinct abilities and attack patterns. And in addition to that, the game takes the procedural nature as far as to randomize which boss you will encounter at the end of the level, so even you never know which sorts of attacks you should expect. The levelling system is also different. You don't simply select a couple of stats to increase and instead the game selects 2 cards (or 3 depending on one perk) and you can select one of them. These cards have either permanent effects like increased mana capacity or they simply restore your mana/health. This allows for interesting situational choices that you can make based on your current mana and health levels.
While there is a lot to praise, I'd like to also highlight some issues I've had with this game. First of all, you can't save your progress. Ever. It's expected to have the game delete your saves after you die, but in this case you can't save at all. The developers said that this is due to the average length of the runs, which are around 50-60 minutes but I don't think that's good enough. I'm a busy person and I can often only play for around 20-40 minutes before having to close the game and do something else. This means that I often have to simply leave the game which means that I won't get new cards to use in future runs that you normally would when you die or complete the game.
Another thing is the performance. Usually the game runs super smooth even with all of the settings maxed out, but in some rooms where there is a lot of water the game might run at unplayable framerates. I guess it's due to having the water reflections turned on, because I didn't have as much problems after disabling it. When the framerate drops to ~5 FPS you have to really think about doing some optimization with your game.
Apart from those two things, the game is really solid and the only thing it needs gameplay-wise is probably just more monsters, rooms and spells and that's about it. It's absolutely one of the best Early Access titles out there, so you might want to consider making a purchase. But keep that saving thing in mind when thinking about buying the game so that it doesn't bite your ankle afterwards.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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3 comments
This is most likely going to be my next purchase. I have to say I'm disappointed it has no saving possibility but fortunately I'm quite bad playing games.
I don't understand the negativity against Early Access. Whining about bugs or lack of optimization in Early Access games is a bit meaningless. In the end those same problems are present in multimillion AAA-titles as well. According to some studies 68% of software projects fails. Early Access project are hardly exception.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/projectfailures/study-68-percent-of-it-projects-fail/1175
I don't understand the negativity against Early Access. Whining about bugs or lack of optimization in Early Access games is a bit meaningless. In the end those same problems are present in multimillion AAA-titles as well. According to some studies 68% of software projects fails. Early Access project are hardly exception.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/projectfailures/study-68-percent-of-it-projects-fail/1175
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I totally agree with Samsai. It is in a really nice state of developement despite the fact that it is still in early access. The game is also a lot of fun.
@edge
To be honest, a savegame/checkpoint option would break the game imho. The fact that you will unlock items/new characters by progressing further inside the dungeon with each try would make it unnecessary to beat it more than twice. Also after several tries you should be able to beat the game in under 1h.
@edge
To be honest, a savegame/checkpoint option would break the game imho. The fact that you will unlock items/new characters by progressing further inside the dungeon with each try would make it unnecessary to beat it more than twice. Also after several tries you should be able to beat the game in under 1h.
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@killx_den: The same argument against saving was brought with Rogue Shooter (which is similiar, but Scifi). What I'd argue for is not a save-game system like in Skyrim but rather a "suspend and continue" system, so we can play each death in chunks of say 15 minutes or less. One level at a time or something. But NOT reload after death (see e.g. the default mode of Dungeons of Dredmor).
Sure, by moving files this can be exploited to mimick a full save system, but if you really wanted to, you could run the game in a VM for that purpose and save the VM state as a "savegame". When there is a leaderboard then maybe games that used saves should be excluded or get a separate list to prevent cheating, but otherwise I see no reason not to include a suspend+continue type of savegame.
Sure, by moving files this can be exploited to mimick a full save system, but if you really wanted to, you could run the game in a VM for that purpose and save the VM state as a "savegame". When there is a leaderboard then maybe games that used saves should be excluded or get a separate list to prevent cheating, but otherwise I see no reason not to include a suspend+continue type of savegame.
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