Instead, they hold “charges” that resemble your inventory for instance your regular potion holds a maximum of 4 charges, which means you can only use 4 potions unless you find more in the dungeon. Red cards are consumable items but they are not consumable themselves. The beauty of this game is that cards are used to tie together several mechanics so that it’s easy to build one’s equipment-the deck in deckbuilding. In short, everything you need in BoD is represented as a card: Here’s a warning: deckbuilding here doesn’t mean what you probably think it means. This is intended, and is made more explicit by leaving footprints on the path indicating whether you’ve already been there (and golden footprints indicate that you’ve at least walked all possible paths in a particular branch). A pared-down dungeon means you can very easily read how much of it you’ve already explored. This might seem like a step down, but it’s not. There’s branches, circuits and dead-ends of course, but at any given time the player has-mostly-only two choices of direction. Generally speaking, the dungeons in BoD are a series of corridors connected together. 2.2.1 The DungeonsĬalling the maps “dungeons” might be a bit of a stretch, given that these are more like mazes. This is all about traversing the dungeons with little regard to grand narratives, instead focusing intensely on a few core mechanics of the genre: HP/MP management, enemy herding and weakness exploiting. 2.2 Game manifestos are fine and all, but what about gameplay?īoD attempts to capture that magic of early Hack and Slash games, but without fluff. It’s necessary to keep this larger view in mind when discussing this game. Thing Trunk’s Filip Starzyński explains/defines the following as characteristics of mid-core games: So, what exactly is a mid-core game? Basically, the space that exists between the hardcore and casual audiences. This way the games can be enjoyed by people who don’t have much time (like grown-up fans of the classic games, or casual players accustomed to playing Angry Birds). We are also simplifying and/or straight-out changing the mechanics and compressing the experience of the original games into extremely short gameplay sessions. Our goal is to bring back the experiences and universal stories of those hit games and make them accessible to everyone – both casual and hardcore players. Each R2G title is a tribute to a single hit game from the 90’s: a reimagining of a single universal story for a brand-new audience, using modern means and innovative gameplay mechanics. There will be 7 games in total, each unique in terms of genre and theme, but all sharing the same grand vision. Return 2 Games is a series of unique mid-core games inspired by the golden days of PC gaming. BoD is part of a suite of games called Return 2 Games, that the devs explain like so (emphasis mine): There’s lots of interesting design choices about this game, but I want to focus first on the ideal behind developing team Thing Trunk. Lots of this game’s specific mechanics will be covered under the header “A streamlined way to hack and slash.” As always, if all you want to know is a simple review and opinion, skip to the header “What do you think, Andy?”Ģ Why is this different? 2.1 Return 2 Games and mid-core game I will proceed to write about why this game is different in my view, discuss some of its design decisions, larger view of the developer team and game design as a whole. The main game loop is that: guide your hero ( Warrior, Rogue or Mage) through the dungeon, chugging potions, activating abilities, slaying bosses and finding loot. In other words, imagine the dungeons from games like Diablo or Diablo II and taking away some of their bloated design so that you can slay baddies day in, day out.
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