I've been playing Incursion lately, and wow, the further I get into the game the more it's really, really annoying me.
I'm not even talking about the bugs. Just the design decisions. The dungeon is full of monsters, a good half of which are non-hostile to me, and they're constantly fighting amongst themselves. That's never really been a feature I've been too excited by (though I've seen other people piss themselves with delight over it in other games - maybe it's a genre thing), but here it absolutely doesn't work. I don't want to constantly be interrupted by having to press through a slew of messages about grid bugs fighting with each other, or the air genasi warrior fighting a halfling barbarian. And the neutrals are nearly as bad. If I want to travel anywhere I'm constantly slowed down by 'Confirm attack the frost slug?'. And when you start running into shit like hordes of white worm masses you'll want to pull your hair out. Oh, and speaking of that, which genius decided that having multiple creatures on one tile was a needed thing in roguelikes? Because if you ever need to see an example of how badly that shit can go, I invite you to play Incursion. If it isn't 50 gremlins on a single tile, it's having to constantly make 6 keypresses just to attack an enemy who is sharing a tile with a neutral guy. Christ.
The whole game feels like it's covered in molasses, constantly waiting for you to take a step and sink into it. The UI is incredibly slow and cumbersome. You have a limited number of slots on your belt to hold potions, wands, etc, with the idea being that you can access these tools quickly but to take ones out of your pack takes much longer. A good idea in theory, but in practice you're very likely to have your healing potions, dimension door (think Blink from Nethack/Angband), and arrows on three slots, leaving just two to play with. The end result is much less options being utilised in combat - I keep finding wands or scrolls or potions that sound kind of cool, but I have to just dump them because I've already used up all my quick item slots and in a desperate situation it's much safer to just teleport away than fumble around in my backpack trying to reach a Dispel wand that MIGHT work.
And don't even get me started on the item redundancy (why do I have potions and scrolls that do exactly the same thing? What benefit is gained by having four different types of currency, all of which are found in such low quantities that I might be able to make one purchase per game that isn't food rations? And most importantly, why is my character automatically picking up holy symbols after every fucking cultist I kill? Because unless it's to make a bloodstained chain of them to wear around my neck as a trophy then I'm not interested in doing so).
But yeah, back to being slow as shit. There are torches dotted around the walls that serve, so far as I can tell, absolutely no purpose but to cause my stealthy characters to have their movement interrupted by 'Confirm enter the brightly-lit area? [yn]'. I can assure you, whatever deep tactical considerations are gained by this shit really isn't worth the tedium it creates. And speaking of tactics, I'm trying to avoid mentioning the bugs, given how well-known it is that the game isn't finished, but it could at least have the fucking decency to accurately label which feats are implemented and which aren't. In my last game I picked up both Whirlwind Attack and Spring Attack, neither of which worked correctly. Whirlwind Attack worked once before forever providing me with 'That feat isn't implemented yet!' messages, and Spring Attack constantly gave messages about not being able to leap that far, no matter how close the enemy I targeted was.
The alignment system is nothing but a frustrating hindrance - half the sapient enemies you fight will get frightened before you finish them off, and you have to offer them the opportunity to surrender to avoid losing alignment points and potentially pissing off your god. Aside from being more pointless keystrokes, this carries the very real danger that the enemy will in fact surrender, and if he does so without 'throwing all his gear at your feet as a tribute', you can kiss goodbye to whatever cool shit he had, because there's no good way to force him to part with it. Surely I'm not the only one frustrated by watching a shitty goblin run across a room, pick up a pair of magic boots, and then be unable to get the fucking things off the greedy little bastard without risking excommunication. Well, unable is technically a lie, as somewhere between all the myriad options of 'Break, Rub, Divide, Enlist, Smell, Inscribe', there actually is one for my character to say 'Mate, you're lucky I'm not genociding your entire race, now give me the loot before I chop your fucking feet off', but my god seems to take issue with that for some reason.
And again, I said I'd try to avoid mentioning the bugs, but I'll abandon that for a moment to point out that the above isn't even as bad as it gets regarding alignment/god issues. You can frighten monsters that qualify as sapient but can't talk, like (I think, this is off the top of my head here) elementals. Some of which regenerate. So you can be left in the ludicrous position of fighting an elemental until it's weak and frightened, and then it tries to flee. If you kill it at this point, your god gets pissed off, and you don't have the option of offering it surrender because it can't talk. But within four or five turns the thing will regenerate enough hitpoints to get over its fear, turn around, and START BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF YOU AGAIN. So you hit it back, weaken it, probably frighten it again... this can repeat for a depressingly long time. And just taking the alignment hits isn't an obvious choice to make, because there are so many fucking neutral monsters that you're likely to be low on alignment points anyway from things like accidental splash damage, arrows missing your target and hitting some oblivious fucker behind him, wands, etc etc. The scary part is I don't even know if that elemental thing would be considered a bug, that's how fucked the design seems to be.
I'm currently a level 5 Ranger/3 Rogue dicking around on level 6 or so, which isn't the furthest I've been but it's not bad. I recently found a group of five adventurers, three of whom were hostile to me, two of whom weren't and were busy constantly filling my log with displacement messages. Attacking the three who were hostile to me, I killed one before another one disarmed me of one of my two weapons, whereupon one of the neutral adventurers immediately picked it up. After escaping to regroup, I came back and offered to buy my rapier back from the guy who'd picked it up, but he's now wielding it which seems to mean the only way I can get it back is if I attack him, which I can't afford to do because I'm currently only 'Nominally Good' after accidentally killing a frightened air elemental.
It's a shame, because there's almost a half-decent game behind all the shit. Julian Mensch did a surprisingly good job adapting the D&D rules into a roguelike, which makes it so much more baffling that he introduced new issues that have nothing to do with either D&D or roguelikes! I can't think of any other games I've played where dungeons are chock-a-block with neutral adventurers that dart between your feet picking up the loot of everything you kill, and neither do I recall it being an issue in actual D&D. And equally strange is that rather than take full advantage of D&D's tradition of varied encounters and enemies so much of the creature list seems to be 'That earlier creature, but with buffed stats!'. I've gone from fighting monitor lizards, kobolds, sauhaugin and elven priests on D1 to fighting gaseous lizards, elite kobolds, skilled sauhaugin and who fucking cares just let me die so this can end elf priests on D:5 and D:6. I saw an Umber Hulk earlier and I was so fucking appreciative to be fighting something new that I was actually reluctant to kill it. I wanted to shoo it off into a quiet corner to make babies somewhere, so that future adventurers after me would have more enemy variety to enjoy.
It's not terrible by any means. There are good moments, and I'm having enough fun that I'll finish off this character at the very least. But I can't help but feel as if I'm not playing a game at all so much as I'm some weird avatar in Julian Mensch's dungeon ecology simulator. For all the waxing lyrical about 'the world shouldn't revolve around the player' and how great it is that there's a wider world and yadda yadda yadda, Incursion is certainly an example of how to implement that concept badly. I don't want a billion neutral monsters cluttering up the dungeon, I don't want to find better gear by walking into a room I've been in fifty times before and to see a bunch of corpses because some random monster killed some adventurers there while I was asleep. I want my progress to be decided by my own decisions, not by random chance or the simulated actions of neutral parties. Basically, I want to be the hero. Perhaps it's more realistic the way it is, but let's be honest with ourselves: who's playing games because of how similar to real life they are? Twats, that's who.
Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a review so much of a rant but still, in summary: the first couple of levels are actually pretty fun, but it rapidly gets worse. If you're still interested, play Sil, you'd be much better off.
