Tried out Dungeon Hack. Took me five starts before I was able to descend into the lower level - before that, every generated dungeon was incomplete, with no way to reach the stairs. The first one was the most ridiculous - just a corridor and two rooms, no secret switches or illusionary walls at all.
The dungeons definately feel like they were randomly generated. I guess I'm just spoiled by a couple of nice screenshots showing large dungeon levels with many corridors, interconnected rooms etc. Maybe it gets better as one descends further?
The amount of locked doors seems to be a bit too large. With a low "Keys" setting, I had about eight or nine locked doors on the top level.
So far I've seen no doors that couldn't be opened by a key or button. What is the point of rogues in this game? As far as I gather, there's no stealth of any kind nor any backstabbing (attacks land more frequently when monsters turn their backs no matter what character I play).
In regards to monsters, there are indeed two monster types per level plus a single tougher one. So far, the tougher ones were placed randomly, far from the exits.
In terms of difficulty, the first three levels were a breeze with a dwarf fighter/cleric. That changed when I fell into a pit on the fourth level. The fifth is made up of Cockatrices and Ghost Warriors. Cockatrices are slow and don't hit too hard, but the petrification is pretty annoying. Ghost Warriors on the other hand are fast and strong, can't even use the traditional hit and run tactic on them, and an encounter of more than one equals an instant reloading. Turn undead seems to have no noticable effect.
I ran into one trap so far, and it only did 2-4 points of damage.
As for food, on a moderate setting (3 on a 0-7 scale) I found a total of three rations, one per fully explored level.
Overall, seems like a pretty fun game. Somewhat bland, but that's to be expected. The interface is decent enough for a single player character.
Unkillable Cat said:
IIRC, DH "fills out" the map on every level.
Yeah, it seems the game generates portions of the dungeon as you play, based on a seed number generated at the start. This explains why starting a new game is much quicker than reloading a save game and the frequent loading times when walking around. I've seen slight differences in enemy placement between reloads.
Sceptic said:
BTW there's a weird bug I always got in DH, which is that items eventually stop appearing in the lower levels. It's a big problem if you have keys on, because you can end up in a situation where the key to a door on that level doesn't spawn, and you're stuck and unable to finish. Happened to me a couple of times.
That sound pretty bad, and since I've already ran into problems at the start... This is definately a possibility. But it seems that there are no unique keys/gems/mallets, so it's probably possible to avoid it by editing the inventory with a save game editor, if there is one of course.
