Tales of Maj'Eyal

This is a pretty bad game in my opinion. Let me just list some things I think are wrong with it.

Strength of enemies scaling to match your level. This sort of thing in RPGs is really just laziness, and inability of the developer to responsibly balance the game. I disapprovingly wag my finger at it in all it's manifestations.

Character builds lack nuance, and the skills are unbalanced. Learn which skills suck (and yes, there are skills that just suck) and which ones are good and then always pick them accordingly. The moment you start the game you know exactly how your character is going to end up. This sort of thing isn't terrible, and in many kinds of RPG it's just a given, but in a game which is ostensibly a roguelike I'd personally like to see more depth and flexibility, less certainty.

No consumable resources. There aren't really any single use items like potions or scrolls or whatever. Things like wands just go on cooldown and have infinite charges. You also have no "hunger clock" or any such thing so you're free to recover to full strength after every fight. This tends to make fights with average enemies feel really pointless since you've no reason not to be going all out 100% of the time. You're not conserving anything. You can spam your best attacks, take as long as you want, leave and come back 100 times, etc.

Minimal "tactics" involved in combat. The various types of enemies and their specific abilities are usually irrelevant. Whether it's a goblin or a ghoul or a wolf hardly ever really matters. How threatening something is depends almost totally on its level rather than its type (this goes back to the scaling thing). Movement feels very "free" in this game. Things like moving 5 spaces in a single turn or on demand teleportation are readily available to most characters. Positioning on the battlefield feels like it doesn't matter too much, and indeed a lot of areas are just wide open space. The lack of finite resources also contributes to a lack of strategy in combat.

Inventory / equipment management is an absolute nightmare.

There are myriad smaller annoyances. The wandering bandits who attack you on the overworld for instance. It's impossible for them to ever actually trap you, so they serve only two purposes: to arbitrarily prevent you from navigating too carelessly what is essentially a glorified list of destinations anyway (why), or to allow you to scum for experience and gear. Both of these are dumb. And there's lots of stuff like that. Just random careless design. There are probably some more significant things as well that I've just forgotten since I haven't played this game in a long time.

In conclusion, this game just doesn't feel like a roguelike. If you're looking for a simple RPG in which your character grows linearly, you watch numbers go up, and you get to blast weaklings with overpowered attacks, maybe you'll like this game. If you want nuance and strategy, play something like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup instead.

And for an example of what I mean by "tactics" and such, let's imagine playing these games without, for instance, diagonal movement. If you try to play DCSS without diagonals, you'll be brutalized (this might make for an interesting challenge, come to think of it). ToME without diagonals on the other hand? Very, very doable.

I don't claim to be have expert knowledge when it comes to roguelike, but this is the best roguelike that I've played. This game is immensely deep but it's also rather easy to get into, unless you require to have fancy graphics and all which this game clearly doesn't have. The battles are turn based with a over the top view, and the movement is grid based so every move really counts and you have all the time in the world to think about the right one to do. I've clocked in 18 hours so far, but it does feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. You'll find many people with hundreds (and even thousands) of hours poured into the game, it's really fun and challenging.

There are 2 main modes to go by, one is adventure where you gain some extra lives at specific experience levels or you can go more for the real roguelike experience with just 1 life with the apply titled roguelike mode. There's multiple difficulty levels available (most of them are locked), but even on the normal mode the game isn't so easy to master and complete (which I haven't done yet). One of the best aspects of the game is the multiple race and classes, you can make any combination of race and class to create your character. The game starts with the choice of 6 races and 8 classes, but as you progress in the game you will have new birth options to unlock when you complete certain events. The base game currently features 4 extra races and 20 extra classes, while the expansions add even more to that. The race will define your base stats and where you start in the world, but the classes are really about the playstyle. What's so amazing about this system is that every class really plays differently, for example a Berserker, an Archer and a Summoner all have 3 completely different approaches to battles so it really makes the game varied when you restart over with a new class (and you will, since you will die). Also the game features an insane amount of loot (Diablo style), but your class can't make use of all of it which makes each class a really unique experience.

The game does have quite an amount of lore, but frankly I'm not that much into it but it's certainly not bad. I'm here more for the extremely good tactical gameplay, and just the vast amount of variance and replay-ability the game brings. There are thousands of achievements to unlock, and I've only done a dozen or so far so it feels like there is endless gameplay in there (and I'm not even thinking about what the expansions bring). TOME4 has really surpassed my expectations, from a genre that I never considered myself a big fan of, it makes me reevaluate my perception of the roguelike concept. Definitely would recommend this game to all fans of RPG systems, this game is highly satisfying in that aspect. You can acquire it for free, but by making a donation or getting on Steam/GOG you will unlock the online features and a few other quirks which are neat to have.

About half a dozen RPGs in a trenchcoat pretending to be a roguelike. Unavoidably flawed given how huge it is, but mod support is excellent and you can easily improve/get rid of the annoying stuff (or add more if you like your RPGs bloated to hell and back). Has one of the ugliest, least functional tilesets ever, but the fake ASCII mode looks fantastic and you don't want to know what a yeek really looks like anyway.

Also, a warning: prolonged exposure to the Last Hope/Gates of Morning music will cause massive headaches.