I think so, though I'd say wait for a sale vs. full $20 asking price.

I like the combat system much better than Grimrock. Real-time with pause and queued commands, decent build variety for characters and party. It's generally based around tank/aggro, + healer + 2 dps, and pretty good range of customization options in terms of auto-pause, 8 difficulty settings, etc. No having to look up obscure rune combos to cast spells, and little/no grid dancing.

The classes themselves hew somewhat closely to WoW (druid, disc priest, warlock, mage, etc.) in terms of spells in their basic design, and the combat doesn't have much in the way of animation if you care about such things. But there are a few puzzles, etc. It probably lags slightly behind Grimrock on the puzzle side.

The automap is default to not be on until you find the actual map on each level, but if that bugs you you can set the game to automap if that really bothers you.

I think the hardest thing is that a few challenges are a bit opaque and since not a lot of people have played it, you're probably just going to have to work through it. Right now I'm starting at what I'm pretty sure is a secret door and I haven't the slightest idea how to open it. I'm about 8 hours in and just cleared to level 5 out of 15 or so.

Not sure if I would replay it in whole, but I'm quite satisfied and enjoying it for the $5 I paid.

Thanks for your opinion. I know from here what you play and prefer, so it's really valuable. Thank you.

Actually it sounds really interesting, however it may be hard to complete (due to missing community support and the game size - it seems to be longer then Grimrock and Vaporum joined together).

By the way - keep in mind that Vaporum is rather easy in terms of puzzles, much easier then Grimrock. I checked the solution once or twice (at the very end it was impossible for me to find the solution myself).

What about system requirements of FoDG? Vaporum is much prettier then Grimrock, but it's also more demanding in terms of resources. In my case it switched to medium settings (still looked great) and there were still some hiccups a few times.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I had beaten this one at least a couple of times on the Xbox - once for light side and then a dark side run - but this is the first time I've played through it on the PC. Visually it actually holds up pretty well thanks to that classic Star Wars art direction. Jeremy Soule is no John Williams but he does contribute some nice and fitting original music.

I usually default to playing fighter classes in RPGs (probably just laziness), so for this run I wanted to branch out a little and I did a scoundrel/Jedi sentinel class, so I was bit more reliant on Force powers instead of just clobbering everyone with the lightsaber. It ended up being a bit uncomfortable toward the end (tip: make sure you have at least one offensive power like "disable droid" or something for that final battle), but with patience and some creativity (and save scumming) my wimpy, poorly optimized character was able to scrape by.

I still like the game a lot and it hits a pleasant balance between a real hardcore RPG and the overly stripped down "press A for awesome" RPGs that generally followed it. Bioware just took their methods for the Baldur's Gate games and applied them to the Star Wars setting and a new console-friendly 3D engine. Considering how hard it apparently is to create enjoyable new Star Wars stories, it gives me renewed appreciation for how Bioware was able to make something that feels like classic Star Wars during a time when everything was dominated by the prequels (admittedly, the pod racer game is pretty cool and people seem to like Republic Commando). Even their giant space station manages to not be another Death Star variation.

What I dislike about the game is mostly the same stuff I dislike about all real-time-with-pause games. Poor pathfinding, which is worsened by the game's behind-the-back view of your character, so you can't track your teammates easily. It's annoying to go to an exit and get the "you must gather your party..." message because you didn't notice someone getting hung up on a piece of furniture when you started moving. It's even worse if you wander into a fight and are setting up for the first rounds. Commands occasionally don't register, or characters will attack the wrong target or even stand completely idle while one character is being ganged up on by 3 or 4 enemies. Basically you end up micromanaging everyone even more than you would in a regular turn-based game. Also, the console-ized features like the swoop racing and the space battle minigames, although appropriate to the setting are just kind of annoying (at least the racing is optional like the Pazaak card game).

This week I finished:

1. Rise of the Tomb Raider
2. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III

I played it about two years ago, and tbh I thought it was already very dumbed down. Its combat is extremely poor imo, one just has to spam flurry and the speed force powers and almost nothing stands a chance. There also are hardly any special or well-designed encounters, just mobs of forgettable, generic standard enemies.
It's actually most challenging at the start when you don't have a lightsaber or force powers, but later on it just becomes ridiculously easy, especially once you can have a party entirely consisting of Jedi characters (never used the non-Jedi ones after that, unless required by the story). Few crpgs have really good combat, but the Kotor games definitely are very weak in this regard.
Kotor 1 really did nail the Star wars feeling perfectly though. I also kind of liked the romance with Bastila, despite her being somewhat annoying at times.

I think I didn't notice about the combat this time around because I was sort of going out of my way to develop my character in a more counter-intuitive way than usual, so my guy spent most of the game relatively underpowered and generally getting his ass kicked. I do recall in my previous runs just kicking the crap out of everyone.

Yeah, I find Bastila amusing because she reminds me of how Leia probably would have turned out if she'd been raised as a Jedi from the start: hot-headed arrogance combined with literally a lot of force. The romance with her is fairly well-done for a video game. In real life, I find people with a personality like that to be unappealing, but in the game it's more fun. I think it's because in a game it's all about overcoming a challenge, in this case rising up to and winning over and redeeming someone who is contemptuous of you at the start, even if it's really an illusion because the plot is designed to work best with her as a romantic interest and there's really little challenge in it at all.

X-com: UFO Defence

I had only ever played Enemy Unknown (+ DLC) before playing this one. I had heard this game was hard before I played it, I thought "Enemy Unknown wasn't that difficult once you knew what you were doing, it can't be that difficult", but just in case I played the game on the easiest difficulty. Boy was I naïve. My first playthrough ended with me rage quitting after my 2nd mission, where at the end of turn 1, a grenade was thrown into the dropship killing every single 1 of my soldiers. I eventually came back to it after learning that there were remote control tanks you could send out first, which instantly improved my experience. I started with the idea of doing an ironman playthrough, this eventually changed to 'Ironman unless a grenade kills several crew in 1 shot' which then changed to 'Ironman unless one of my good soldiers got killed' which then changed to 'Ironman unless something bullshit happens'. I lost 30 of my 50 soldiers (There is no graveyard section in this game, so I manually tracked it), lost funding from the UK and France, but managed to complete the final mission within one in-game year.

Now, if you were like me, played Enemy Unknown and wanted to play the original, heres somethings you should know. All soldiers, regardless of armour, can be killed in 1 shot, armours purpose is to make sure you survive shots that graze you. Cover is also much rarer, you can get missions in the desert, which often has no cover at all. The enemies ability to know where you are is ridiculous, they can turn a corner, spot you, then know your exact position, even if you move from there, for the next 5 or so turns. This is coupled with the 'op'ness of psychic powers, which can be used from any point on the map, against any point on the map, this means if you do a mission with 10 psychic aliens, you will spend it by having your team bombarded with mind control attempts at the end of every single turn. If you enjoyed the 'base attack' mission from Enemy Unknown, well you'll have plenty of those in this game, enemies decide after every loss whether they want to get revenge on you or not, which ends up with a battleship heading towards your base. While this does make it seem like a bitch to play through, your enemy also suffers the same handicaps as you, once you research plasma weapons you too will be able to kill your enemies in 1 hit.

The gameplay and enemies haven't changed much as the series has gone on, Chryssalids look wildly different between the two games and Ethereals use guns. I found the game difficult to get a hang of, until I saw a video playthrough, by just remembering a few tips you can easily get the hang of this game, though misclicks can be frustrating. I'd recommend this to any fan of Enemy Unknown, though you better be ready for a shock once you play it.

Namariel Legends: Iron Lord (fanatical $1 bundle)

The base game is, on the whole, an above average experience by Shaman, with some of the same minor flaws I've observed in their other games. Also some of the same assets, so a lot of things looked quite familiar despite seemignly being an entirely different game universe.

As cons:
1) Some of the interface is wonky (e.g. in most games you move back by placing the mouse near the bottom of the screen - here you can do that, but it's touchy, and the game loves to pull the inventory up to hose up what you are trying to do. Oddly they have a "go back" button farther to the right, so one wonders why they bothered including a redundant feature they couldn't make work. Because the standard tool existed, I kept trying to use it by habit even though it seemed somewhat defective.
2) Puzzles do have directions, but in a few cases the directions are pretty obtuse, even when the game itself is quite simple. And in one case, the game was bugged, though resolved itself by quitting and re-entering the game.
3) One voiced child character is just excruciatingly/laughingly bad. The accent is bad and wholly over the top to begin with (somewhere between southern U.S. and cockney?), and then kinda mellows out and bounces all over the place. No idea what they were going for there.

But the delivery is charming, and while not exactly original, still on the whole an enjoyable story to whiz through. Really no hidden object finds to speak of, just adventuring and puzzling. While it's not Moliere, it's fairly engaging and mostly sensical, within the context of the game world.

The bonus chapter, on the other hand, is an abomination. It's the epitome of "just one damn thing after another" for an hour, and unlike world history, you can't even bust out your knowledge of Namariel Legends at a cocktail party to make small talk.

To the extent it has any plot at all, almost none of it makes sense (the villain kidnapped _____ why exactly?), and all the content feels like the epitome of wasted time. E.g. you spend time preparing a submarine, powered by a mechanical heart, to ultimately go like 20 feet, down a channel that has a wide concrete embankment. Given that you're rushing to chase the villain who kidnapped _____ and has a huge headstart to begin with, why did you not just walk the 20 feet and save 3-4 steps?

Disclaimer : I'm the game author.

You have a full walkthrough here : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1119258123 .
But this door might be related to this : http://www.managames.com/DungeonGuardians/faq-troubleshooting/#treasurehunt .

In addition of the walkthrough linked above, I'm also always around to help players in needs... ;-)

Dungeon Guardians isn't much demanding, about same than LoG1, so a lot less than Vaporum... :)

Pillars of Eternity.

Outlaws (1997)

Had stopped playing in the sawmill level, but did a 2nd run and finished it. Atmosphere and cutscenes are great, but I didn't like the level design and gameplay that much...Dark forces was a lot more fun. Had to play on the easiest difficulty, above it's too challenging for me :-(

I'd rate it as 3/5.

Metal Slug

Plays very similar to classic run and guns like Contra or Gunstar Heroes with the difference being you die in 1 hit. There's only 5 levels, with a mid boss and boss in each level. I'm not sure if this is meant to be set during a particular war, the setting ranges from Vietnamese jungle to occupied French town. The game is good fun, and I would recommend it.

1. Ys IV (PCE CD)
2. Exile (w/ Unworked Designs patch)(PCE CD)
3. Macross 2036 (PCE CD)
4. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (PC)
5. AM2R (PC)
6. TaleSpin (NES)
7. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (PC)
8. Super Mario 64 (N64)
9. Star Fox 64 (N64)
10. Thunder Force V (US ver.)(PS1)
11. Kirby's Adventure Wii (Wii)
12. Caesar III (PC)

Finally beat the peaceful(-ish) path of the campaign after several hours spent with each of the last three missions. It's a pretty good city building game for the time, and a less "clinical" experience than SimCity 2000 for example. Here you have walkers with voiced comments, more direct control and overview of trade with other cities, a more rounded and warm look and decent cutscenes displaying important events, and of course the roman empire setting. But I definitely prefer how SC plays. It's fairly easy to make a nice city without learning tons of obtuse mechanics and how to avoid various issues there, and it's more advanced in some ways despite being years older, whereas in this game I had to learn every little quirk over the course of a week or so and even watching an expert play the later missions and lowering the difficulty to easy at times I could still just barely beat them due to various bugs. I'll check out the sequels at some point but now it's time for a change of pace.

Hey, thanks a lot for the answer and for useful links!

If we have the game's author here, I cannot resist to ask:
a) how's the sale and future plans? I saw The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians in Fanatical bundle - I suppose it doesn't mean anything good for future expected profits, am I right? :(
b) did you saw that article and thread? perhaps you'd like to share your opinion about indie market and players/customers? :)
c) and why the game is unavailable here, on GOG??

And also thanks a lot for keeping dungeon crawlers genre alive. I'm really happy that there are still people making these kind of games - and some of them make them perfectly! I hope your game is one of these gems - I'll check that for sure, because I've just purchased my own copy ;)

Oh, and thanks for Linux port! Considering that the game is quite niche and Linux is still niche in the niche - it's really kind of you!

Duke Nukem II thanks to PaterAlf. Second Duke is much better choice, than first one. Not only, because it came from "technically more advanced age", but game have got much more options. This is really good platformer, which leads me to idea, that I should continue with 3D...