Kilgazar Kilgazar is a short and simple roguelike, complete with permadeath. You select one of the three available characters (fighter, mage, rogue) with your choice of gender and are immediately thrust into the dangerous game world with only some text that your village was destroyed. Each of the three characters play differently enough that your experience with the game will also be significantly different. The warrior has more hp, but can only attack in close range and has short movement, the rogue is fast and can attack from range, but his ammunition is limited and his damage a bit low, while the mage can attack from afar and deal significant damage, but your hp is seriously lacking and each of your attacks consume mana. Leveling up is a simple process, as you gain stats automatically, you have no choice how your character develops and you gain no new skills (except for the mage who gets new spells). Something that is definitely similar to each playthrough is the game's difficulty; it can be pretty brutal on the 1st level. If you are not careful and just rush ahead, you will be dead within seconds; thus, you must explore the map carefully.
Speaking of maps, they contain enemies, chests and nothing else. I didn't find either some secret passages or some traps, which could have added some nice variety to them. As they stand, they are a bit barren. Something else that I wasn't particularly fond of is that it's pretty unclear what class will have a more difficult time than the others. While one would think that the mage would be the hardest to play with, he is actually the easiest, while the fighter the hardest and the archer a bit too tedious. Playing as the mage, you have access to long range, devastating spells (while also having a very good defense against other mage characters who pose a great threat to warriors and rogues), while the poor warrior is unable to fight back against ranged attackers or flee easily from other melee ones and the rogue has an annoying tendency of doing very poor damage or even missing.
As I mentioned above, the game is short. While it's not necessary that you'll complete the game in your first try (I very much doubt it in fact), once you can manage the first two levels, the rest aren't particularly difficult. I considered save-scumming but it proved unnecessary. Completing it with all three classes took me a bit over 3 hours. Still, I liked playing it in bite-sized chunks without being bothered by text, voices, intros and the rest. While the audiovisual factor wasn't something to write home about, it looks clean and I like the usage of tiles instead of sprites for two reasons: 1) It reminds me of tabletop games and 2) the lack of animation would look particularly bad on a sprite-based game (part of the reason why I completely ignore games like Tales of Maj'eyal and Rogue's Tale).
I can finally conclude that, despite its flaws, I enjoyed Kilgazar and wish to adambiser all the best in creating a new deeper roguelike (or whatever kind of game he prefers).
Now, I'll just update my
list.
