Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Completeness:

  Definitely not a complete game. It looks like complete one, but after some time spent on playing The Vaults of Blackrock Castle it feels much more like prototype, or "base" of the game - all major systems are present, but they are often half-baked. There are bugs as well - sometimes monster that teleported away is still drawn next to the player, and inventory is protected from overloading only during picking items from the ground and not during checking chests.

  Aesthetics:

  Nice assets, pleasant pseudo-isometric view, clean menus, straightforward controls. UI is uninspired and a bit hard to read.

  Fun:

  Hard to tell. I can't tell that I had no fun playing The Vaults... but there are too many un-fun issues to ignore. 1) Mouse-only inventory and keyboard-only exploration - it doesn't work well together; 2) game don't scale entities well - at first I didn't feel character progress - leveling up was rising stats, but it seemed to not affect combat much; I has to level several times to feel the difference 3) loot is boring - on the first few levels, the only armor to find was gambeson; later, I started to find mail, mostly 4) when I found nice eq finally, I started to encounter new monsters that made me feel that all my progress was for nothing 5) lots of mending tonics - it seems to be way to play Vaults... - just stack healing potions 6) no way to tell which weapon is better 7) boring dungeon generation

  Innovation:

  Nope, not here.

  Scope:

  Reasonable

  Roguelikeness:

  Hell yeah!

  To sum things up:

  As a game, The Vaults... can't score good marks. As a prototype, it's good starting point. It would need lots of work, but I see potential here...

• This has a solid sense of style to it, which could translate well to a post-7DRL version. The UI in particular I found well developed for the timescale, and a transparent level up system is a refreshing change from arbitrary milestones and makes grinding out everything on a floor actually worth it before delving down. Loot distribution was perhaps too generous - I lived on a full inventory from the first floor onwards multiple times, but I'm never going to truely complain about being able to heal easily in a roguelike.