Roguelikes Ranked
wHeRe iS hADeS?
Tier 1: 1
Tier "play these": 2-6
Tier "I kind of hate myself but I still want to play some fun games while I'm at it": 7-11
Tier NetHack: 12-NetHack
Tier "I've played NetHack but I feel like I haven't scraped the bottom of the barrel enough yet": 15-20
Secret tier (Rogue): I never played Rogue! What a poser!
Tier 1: 1
Tier "play these": 2-6
Tier "I kind of hate myself but I still want to play some fun games while I'm at it": 7-11
Tier NetHack: 12-NetHack
Tier "I've played NetHack but I feel like I haven't scraped the bottom of the barrel enough yet": 15-20
Secret tier (Rogue): I never played Rogue! What a poser!
20 Games
Mostly retired with 150+ wins and a few 10+ streaks over more than a decade, so I'm kinda jaded on it, but the game is still getting better and better. Used to be yet another bloated "classic" roguelike full of pointless features that people just assumed a roguelike needed to have, but has been massively streamlined so that only the fun stuff remains, and the amount of content (and the replayability) is staggering.
1
Probably the least "traditional" of these, completely forgoes exploration and focuses almost exclusively on character building, tactics and decision-making. A lot easier than the average roguelike, since the wizard gets so incredibly powerful, but the deeper levels are always a strict build check.
2
It's a Rift Wizard-like except you don't need to be a wizard! Starts even easier than Rift Wizard, with the build requirements on a fresh save being a lot less strict (and with the player character being much stronger at the start of a run since no skills are out of reach), but you can choose to move on to higher difficulty "cycles" after each victory. A good build will still stomp even the highest cycles, tho - there isn't really much tactical play here, the builds are pretty much the entire game.
3
Encourages you to switch up not only your gear but sometimes your entire build on the go, has about a billion alternate routes and secret endings, and features some god tier aesthetics. Ginormous levels, especially near the end. One of these days I'll figure out how to do more than just zoom my way to a boring regular victory.
4
Best experience/"hunger" systems in any roguelike, also extremely fucking hard - it plays fair and is consistently winnable if you're good enough (I'm not), but requires a completely different approach compared to most other roguelikes.
5
DCSS lite, a bit on the easy side but very well made. Good id minigame! (gasp)
6
Second most played after DCSS, in part because it's just so fucking long - it is heavily streamlined, but even that only goes so far, it's just nuts how long this game is. Absolutely bonkers classes and skills, more crazy ideas in a single ability tree than in some entire games pretending to have variety.
7
Not as packed with cool shit as DoomRL, but much cleaner mechanics. Maybe a bit too fond of deterministic loot for its own good, something I unfortunately don't see changing in the future, and as of now the early levels are a bit boring (while still being perfectly capable of killing you, so you'll be replaying the boring parts rather often), but it's still an improvement on DoomRL.
8
Really feels like Doom, full of extremely cool shit, badass special levels - the only problem is that it suffers from having a few very clunky mechanics that end up being too important to ignore.
9
The colors make me dizzy, it's a bit too much in love with taking items away from your inventory and making you chase after them, and I'm way past playing the kind of id minigame that is absolutely essential to getting a run going, but it's really well designed and more "like Rogue" than pretty much anything else out there. Gets really scary the deeper you go and the food clock pressure is real.
10
Update! Apparently there were some big changes to remove a lot of the randomness that ended a lot of runs. Haven't played it recently but that does fix the one big issue I had with it so it moves up quite a bit to a semi-random provisional slot before I check it out again. The old, now mostly outdated note is as follows:
"I'm a huge fan of the no exp/levels concept, as well as the energy system and the deterministic stealth, but the game is designed to be unfair - and that's not me saying it, it's the author. Not only it is possible to get completely unwinnable runs rather often, but that's also a deliberate design choice. If it wasn't for that it would easily place in the top half, but as it is, it's just garbage that wastes your time."
"I'm a huge fan of the no exp/levels concept, as well as the energy system and the deterministic stealth, but the game is designed to be unfair - and that's not me saying it, it's the author. Not only it is possible to get completely unwinnable runs rather often, but that's also a deliberate design choice. If it wasn't for that it would easily place in the top half, but as it is, it's just garbage that wastes your time."
11
Somehow somewhat decent, for something this bloated and decidedly nethackish. If you don't mind that stuff you'll probably enjoy it, but I recommend just playing ToME instead if you're in the mood for something of this scope.
12
Gives a very strong impression of unlimited possibilities despite being a lot more restrictive in what really works than pretty much every game ranked above it in this list; once I figured out what it wants from the player, the early excitement evaporated. Also has an economy where you can sell things to merchants and is therefore inherently broken even before you get to the Qud-specific exploits that completely ruin the game.
13
"The dev team thinks of everything", except of how to make the game fun instead of just funny. And when you look past all the gotcha spoilers, every run is almost exactly the same.
14
It's just a gimmick, but it's a decent gimmick. No reason to play it more than once, tho.
15
Not bad, just very basic. No big reasons to play it except it's native to mobile where it'll be a much better option than some janky port.
16
It's just a gimmick, and a very disorienting one at that. I guess that was the point all along? Feels more like a puzzle game, and would probably rate higher in a puzzle list. Also a decent mobile option.
17
Hard to rate properly since I'm pretty terrible at it, but making an entire game around managing a roster of allies isn't exactly the most exciting stuff to begin with.
18
Another Rift Wizard-like; the spellcrafting system looked promising but it really needed a better game around it. Very cramped levels severely limit the viability of most combinations, and on top of that there are so many enemies that push you around or swap positions with you that tactical positioning basically does not exist outside of the early levels; you will often be either permanently shoved against the nearest corner, or constantly bounced around with no real counterplay.
19
Novel approach to tactics - it's almost like a combat puzzle minigame inside of a roguelike - but it didn't really convince me to play for long enough to see how far it takes its ideas, even though it's supposedly a rather short game.
20
pelluchan
1 year ago