httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZW_JEo59Nw
As the resident sadomasochist in love with roguelike games, I’ve been waiting for months for Dinofarm Games to release their lovingly crafted take on the genre, 100 Rogues. Now they have, and it’s available on the App Store for $4.99! Kalloo! Kallay!
100 Rogues would be best described as an 8-bit arcade roguelike. All of the hallmarks of the roguelike genre are there — multiple classes, randomized dungeons, permadeath and fantastic arrays of weapons and equipment — but unlike most roguelikes, the graphics here aren’t primitive unanimated tiles. Instead, 100 Rogues triumphantly breaks one of the least admirable traits of the genre by realizing the world with vibrant, colorful pixelart sprites. Also unlike most roguelikes, your adventuring isn’t accompanied by complete silence: 100 Rogues features a beautiful soundtrack of amazing chiptune compositions.
Think of the game as a cross between Shiren the Wanderer and Diablo 2 and you’ll have the right idea. I put some time into it last night, and I fell in love with the game: short of a native iPhone port of Stone Soup, or the Sword of Fargoal guys deciding to port over Nethack, my first impression is that 100 Rogues is about as good a roguelike as the App Store could hope to get.
Unfortunately, there’s a big caveat: the game’s pretty buggy. In fact, it’s so buggy that in the initial release, the developers advise you not to equip a shield if you don’t want the game to crash on you. That’s a huge bug to slip through on a game that has been under development as long as 100 Rogues has been… and other users are reporting additional crash bugs besides. The developers are promising an imminent patch, but for right now, only die-hards like me should be dropping $5 on this game without some serious consideration.
For a more in-depth review of 100 Rogues, check out this great post by Touch Arcade.
