Ziggurat

[illdog]

I have to stop playing Ziggurat a second to tell you about Ziggurat. It's not a game for everyone but I'm really addicted to it.

 

It's a dungeon crawler in FPS style, always limited to 5 floors. It's randomly generated so the same sort of rooms will appear on each floor, you just never know what type of room you will be wondering in to, it's often in the later stages a minion room full of enemies but there are trap rooms, puzzle rooms, secret chest rooms to name a few.

 

The aim of the game is to get to and destroy the boss on the 5th floor of the Ziggurat. The Ziggrat which is a test maze used by a cult of wizards to weed out the average and find the exceptional. To pass each floor the basic requirement is to find the portal key (which is always in a room on it's own but could be anywhere on your current floor) and use this to summon the boss in the dedicated boss room. You can find the boss room before you find the portal key room but the boss cant be summoned without the portal key. Upon destroying the boss, a portal appears and leads you to the next floor.

 

Each floor gets progressively bigger and and the enemies become stronger, later stages introduce some other room types like Obelisk, where you must destroy stone Obelisks that appear whilst the room continus to spawn enemies. All exits are locked untill you have destoyed all obelisks and enemies.

 

You start off wit just your trusty wand but as you progress you can pick up another 3 weapon types. Your wand is unlimited but weak. The other three weapons run off mana, dropped by killed beasties, and must be constantly replenished.

 

Your character can level up by collecting knowledge gems which are dropped mostly by slain enemies. Upon each level up you can pick one from a couple of different perks to aid your survival and it's the wealth of perks available and their varying effects that add a depth to this game. You can choose how to buff your character, for example you can pick to gain more health from potions, you can get a battler cry at the beginning of a fight that gives you extra health, you can choose to increase the mana pools of your varying weapons. You can also choose to do more damage when you drop to a certain health percentage, you can trade in your current weapon stock for a new set of random weapons that have extra firepower, the downside of this is that the fire rate could be a lot slower making some small minion rooms a lot harder. To add to this, each perk can be levelled up itself by picking the same perk again (obviously if it's made available to you) when you level up next time. Each perk can be upgraded 5 times. So do you pick a particular type of perk and make it strong or go for a wealth of abilities that arent strong individually but collectively make you a badass?

 

So you have a choice of how to play the game, peg it through, hoping your lucky and find the portal key and boss room pretty close together so as not to take too much damamge from the rest of the maze or take you time, level up and become more powerfull but potentially fall victim so some fucking tough ass rooms.

 

The real challenge (and addiction for me) has come with the different types of characters available. I think there is possbily only one from the start but you can unlock a total of 16, each with differing abilities which can make each game fiarly unique. For example I just beat the game with a Vampire called Corvus. His energy constantly drains but he gains health by collecting knowlege gems which are normally only for levelling up. Each time I levelled him up it was important to pick perks that aided health restoration (like battle cry or one where damaging in game objects add to your health). I got lucky and had a perk where collecting knowledge gems not only added health but also added mana for my weapons. It started really fucking hard but got easier as I progresseed, I was like a God when I got to the final boss on the fith floor.

 

Other characters have a stong wand attack but shitty mana pools for the other more powerfull weapons, there's a thief character that is really fast, a wizard that has really strong weapons but shitty health or a dude who relies on his battle cry at the beginning of a fight to inject mana and health  but knowledge gems and mana collected dont add much to their respective pools.

 

Fuck me it's a deep old game once you get it. I could understand the point of view that it becomes repetative after a few rounds but I'm addicted. It takes between 45 minutes to an hour for a successful run. I've beaten it with seven different chartacters (they unlock as you progress by killing a certain amount of enemies or dealing a certain amount of total damamge) but I want to do it with all of them. I've got one more dude to unlock.

 

Anyways, im off to play again.

[illdog]

Here's a gameplay video I found that doesn't have some annoying American cunt talking over it:

 

 

[DANGERMAN]

I've got this on PC and never quite got around to it. Always looked fun though