Do share your impressions. My 3ds is gathering dust since good few months now and I'm seriously contemplating getting rid of it.
Well, I only had a chance to mess with the game for an hour or so. My impressions so far are generally positive.
I would say that it's definitely somewhat of a Grimrock-clone. Of course, it doesn't graphically look as good as Grimrock, but it isn't a bad looking game (solid for a handheld title IMO). One nice thing is that in only an hour of playing, I have already seen three different dungeon tile sets, so that's encouraging (seeing the same repetitive dungeon walls for a whole game can be very annoying IMO). There are also some nice graphical elements, such as stained glass windows, which cast beams of colored light. By the way, movement is like Grimrock- 90 degree tile-based, but with smooth transitions, not hopping.
There are three different movement/control schemes. The default is that the analog circle "stick" moves/turns, and to step sideways you hold one of the shoulder buttons and then move the circle stick. You use the 4-way pad to select the four bottom screens (map, melee, magic, and inventory). One of the control schemes lets you use the face-buttons for movement. Overall the game controls well.
The combat is done with stylus swipes on the touchscreen, via horizontal or diagonal swipes. You can swing high or low depending on which part of the screen you swipe. For fighting something like a rat, you have to swing low to hit, of course. Also, armor protects distinct parts of your body (so leather boots actually only help against low attacks for example).
Spell casting is done by placing runes in a certain order, and then swiping across them, which is cool. My first impression is that magic does seem overpowered though. A fire spell does 2 to 3 times the damage of a dagger you have at the same point in the game, plus obviously it's ranged.
One gripe is that your health and mana seem to regenerate much too quickly, which is a bit popamole. It's tough to judge the difficulty since I've played so little, but so far it's a bit easy, but not ridiculously so (I'm playing on the middle of 3 difficulty settings).
Character creation is really nonexistent. You are a premade, nameless character (there is some occasional voice-acting, which is of pretty good quality). You have three stats which you can manually increase at level ups. Your two skills (melee combat and magic) increase automatically depending on which you use more.
Manipulating things in the environment is similar to Grimrock, with the obvious exception that you are moving the stylus instead of a mouse (which actually feels really cool in this game). I'm not a big fan of 3D in general, but in a first person dungeon crawler it's actually sorta cool.
Story wise it's pretty much a typical dungeon crawler. You're heading into a tower to defeat the evil wizard. You get captured and start off imprisoned.
So overall I'm enjoying the game so far. I think most dungeon crawl fans would as well. I would just have reasonable expectations though (this isn't going to be as pretty as Grimrock, or as deep as Wizardry, or as awesome as Might and Magic, etc.). At $13 US I think it's definitely worth a buy.
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