Rezrog

May 31, 2017  Rezrog is a solid idea for a game, taking what would be generic characters and turning them into fun, customizable classes that pair well with the miniature visuals. Yet the repetitive nature of the game, coupled with the absence of a story and the slow introduction, make Rezrog a tedious experience that is difficult to enjoy.

Many people get stuck and frustrated on the first level when fighting the 'boss' of the tutorial, this is some basic strategy on how to defeat him easily almost every time.IntroductionOk, so every level in Rezrog is procedurally generated, and every level is different. Except for the layout of this dungeon. The only thing that changes is the location of the poison spewing gates that litter the floor. Try to avoid them as much as possible as they will damage your character.EntranceAs you enter the dungeon, the door slams behind you, never to open again, the only way out is to get to the other end of this dungeon.

In the northeast corner of the room is a weapons table that contains starter weapons for your class:. Magic users get a staff. Rogue gets a pair of daggers. Archer gets a bow.

Undead Slayer is an Invention perk that increases damage dealt to undead monsters by 7%. It can be created in weapon and armour gizmos. This perk stacks with the effects of the salve amulet and its enchanted version. It does not work on Shattered Worlds' undead monsters.

Warrior gets a sword and shield. Paladin gets a two handed sword.The weapon(s) will be automatically equipped if you don't already have a weapon.A door out leads north.What? I'm Not Alone in Here? AAAH a Monster!As you enter the next room of the dungeon, you will see a quite long room, wandering around in the shadows on the other side of the room is something terrible! A larva!If you have a bow or a staff, if you line up along one of the straight lines, you can engage the creature at range and hurt it before it gets to melee range with you, if not, approach the creature with your weapon, and when you get close, you will enter combat mode.

You can move 2-3 spaces (depending on your character) and perform an attack or pass your turn if you are not in range to attack.The Larva will bite for a small amount of damage, or release a cloud of poison into the air that will occupy a tile until the fight is over. If possible, try not to step into the gas cloud or over any gas vents in the floor to prevent as much damage as possible to your character.One thing of note, and this pertains mainly to melee characters, is that your position regarding a monster is important. On the little base of the character and the monster is a small arrow that sticks out of one side of the base, on the player, it is green, on monsters it is red. That indicates what way they are looking. If you attack them from where they are looking, they are more prepared to defend against that attack, and you will do slightly less damage. If you have the movement and the space to get around to the side of the monster (or even the back!) and you attack from that position, you will cause more damage to the monster. However, don't give up the ability to attack at all when trying to get extra damage on an attack, as even some damage each turn is better than none at all (and possibly giving the monster free attacks) (thank you Skull for mentioning this in the comments to remind me to add this information).When you defeat this terrible monster, you will notice a barrel in the corner of the room that will contain a little bit of gold and 5 healing potions.

Again, a door leads off to the north.Your First Skill, and a Dirty Rat!As you enter the next room, again, it is a large room, with a book on a lecturn right in front of you as you enter, if your character hasn't already obtained this skill before, it will be learned by your character when you interact with the lecturn.There is a rat at the end of the room, Rats are slightly more dangerous than the Larva from the previous room. The rat first of all moves a little bit faster, but it also has an attack that causes you to bleed each round after it bites you.Test out your new skill on the creature, if you are running one of the staff users, the skill will deplete some of your mana pool. Otherwise the skill will have a cooldown.

Once you pummel the rat to death, again in the corner of the room is a barrel that contains a bit of gold, and a set of 5 mana potions. If you are low on mana, drink a few, if you don't use mana, you can either hand them to one of the characters that does later, or sell them for extra money.Make sure you are healed up and ready for a big fight before proceeding through the door to the west.Boss Fight!

And Your Second SkillAs you enter the room, on your left is another Lecturn with your second skill for your character, on the other side of the room is a wizard looking enemy, and the boss of the dungeon! Prepare for a real fight, as this is where most people fail the first few times and get frustrated.The Wizard when engaged will be able to summon a skeleton minion to try and engage you.

Otherwise, he will try and shoot you from range with his staff. His staff will do around 10 damage per shot, so he can kill your character very quickly! The skeleton on the other hand, will only usually do 1 damage per attack.

The key to winning this battle is to kill the wizard and ignore the skeleton.The warrior has the easiest fight here, as his shield bash skill works very well against the wizard, stopping him from being able to summon the skeleton.The mage can also get in the wizard's face and use the ice slab to stun the wizard for a turn while you shoot him down.Anyone else, just do as much damage to the Wizard and he will fall over dead very quickly.If you win, you have finished all the battles in the dungeon, and will have hit level 2 now and been completely healed and all your mana is restored. You also will have 5 statistic points to spend on your stats.Another door leads off to the west.Wrapping Up!As you enter the next room, you will be walking into a jail, inside the cells will be a townsperson (the Innkeeper if this is the very first time you have defeated the dungeon) as well as any of your characters that have been trapped in the dungeon by being defeated by the wizard.

Open the doors and they should disappear and will be waiting for you in the exit room. Before you leave the jail, there is a chest in the corner by the door. It will contain a bit of gold, a legacy gem on the very first victory of this level, and a random piece of chest armor for your character.If you open your inventory, you can right click on the chest armor to identify it for free and equip it to your character to provide some protection.As you exit to the west, the corridor turns south to the exit, around the exit will be any people who were trapped in the dungeon and a door leading to a staircase out of the dungeon.Exit the dungeon, and congratulations, you beat the first level!Written.

Anyone who has sat down to a full and quality session of Dungeons & Dragons can appreciate the nostalgia of taking up a character of your choosing and challenging a Dungeon Master that may or may not be sadistic on a Saturday afternoon. That kind of random adventure, scheming, and questing is the kind of feeling that Soaphog and Kasedo Games surely sought to capture with Rezrog. It’s got many of the fixings of such an event, right down to a certain charming tabletop aesthetic with game markers for players, monsters, and everything.Rezrog does a lot of the little things well. It captures the romp for treasure, the diversity of character classes, and the thrill of survival in ever-changing dungeons featuring a wide array of threats. Unfortunately, Rezrog hits a few missteps trying to capture that feeling. The lonely grind through a dungeon, too often devoid of story and detail, is an unfortunately frequent reminder that your AI Dungeon Master does little to engage your imagination.

Rezrog starts off modestly enough. Seven characters of different classes are traveling the countryside of the titular Rezrog region when an ambush sees them fighting back to back. Following the skirmish, they join together at a nearby inn to revel and relax, but find it devoid of life. It’s as if everyone suddenly left. Looking to at least repay the inn keeper for the food, drink, and warmth they enjoyed, the impromptu party resolves to search the nearby dungeons, find the inn keeper, and solve the mystery of the inn. Immediately, Rezrog sets up a charming little story, but don’t get too used to it. It’s mostly just to set the context of the ensuing adventure.You’ll start in the inn, picking one of your characters before each engagement.

There’s a warrior, paladin, rogue, mage, warlock, summoner, and archer, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and inventory to adventure with, outside of a shared inventory stash and eventual shop keep to trade with. You’re never committed to one party member if you don’t want to be and you can swap gear and items between them easily via the game’s relatively easy systems.

Moreover, as you gain skills, you can level them up and power your characters further for the trials ahead. Rezrog offers a lot of variety in its characters and inventory systems and it’s fairly enjoyable to explore what you can do as each character grows. The randomness of Rezrog starts out pretty cheeky. A dungeon can let you off easy with a good amounts of loot, fairly easy enemies, an easy challenge, and a fast way to the exit.

Other times, it can pummel you with difficult mobs of foes, sparse rewards, a tough challenge, and traps that you have to walk over to get to the goal. If your character dies, they get captured and your task for that dungeon then turns into a quest to save them with your other party members and escape the dungeon.

The only way to really lose is to lose all of your heroes, which can come sooner than you might think if the shuffle of the dungeons doesn’t play in your favor. It can happen even sooner if game bugs come up. One annoying bug happened during combat and would render certain tiles impassable.

Unfortunately, if that tile ends up at a crucial through point to a tunnel or objective, it can make the dungeon impossible to complete. Unfortunately, this happened enough to note and Rezrog is hard enough without level-breaking quirks that make you have to exit back to the map and try again.Combat is an affair that plays out in rudimentary D&D fashion. Every move you make out of combat is a move enemies are allowed to make.

That means you can strategize and reposition near them up until you engage. Once in, your character can move so many tiles and end their turn, attack, or use a skill or item. Then all enemies take a turn. It becomes a back and forth of syncing your skills properly, maximizing your damage, killing a single enemy before others join in, and running away from combat when you need to so you don’t get overwhelmed. Some enemies are easy, others will challenge or be a breeze for a certain class, and others can be downright unfair without proper planning, but with enough might and thinking around Rezrog’s systems, they all fall down. That brings us to an inevitable part of the game. The best way to overcome is to build your characters up by exploring early dungeons thoroughly and that’s where a bit of a grind comes in.

If you want the best for your characters, you’ll need to search every room, open every chest, and kill every enemy to garner money and experience bonuses at the end of the level. At worst, this can be frustrating when the game thwarts you with a hard dungeon and leaves you constantly trying to save your companions. At best, it means you’ll be doing a lot of the same searching, scrapping, skill casting, rinse, and repeat, over and over again as you power your character up and find a strategy that works for any given monster. ThoughRezrog changes its monster variety up at nearly every new dungeon, the long early game is a slog of repetition. Even on late region critters, it only takes a couple engagements and a modicum of consideration to figure out how to quickly dispatch foes in the fewest turns.The sounds and music don’t really help the case in Rezrog. There are a number of short jingles that play as you’re in or out of combat and dungeons and a one hour trek through the game will introduce you to the all of the constant grunts, groans, and musical segments that mark a noticeably repetitive soundtrack.

One would think as you pass through regions, you would get some change in the sounds and story, but we were only introduced to a new region with a brief, wordless, glimpse of a dungeon door in the region. Once inside, you’re treated to the exact same musical riffs and grunts that marked the last region, just with a different skin and some new monsters to kill. The lack of engaging story to go along with any of it punctuates a somewhat hollow roguelike that relies a little too much on randomness and grinding to the next level to overcome the repetition. Minimum:OS: Windows 7Processor: 2 GHz Dual CoreMemory: 2 GB RAMGraphics: 512 MB VRAMStorage: 4 GB available spaceRecommended:OS: Windows 10Processor: 3 GHz Dual CoreMemory: 4 GB RAMGraphics: 2 GB VRAMStorage: 4 GB available spaceRezrog really isn’t a game that should challenge many rigs.

It’s got a modest and somewhat charming look about it. Character and monsters are represented by game markers, rooms are mostly a random assortment of tiles, traps, and objects, and spells are probably the most challenging graphical affair in the game. Rezrog doesn’t really go out of its way to be flashy with its aesthetic.

Instead, it relies on the charm of the game board aesthetic, which both helps and hinders it at times. Additional Thoughts.

Rezrog has a lot of amusing things going on in it. Building up the characters and discovering their abilities is cool. For their sake alone, the grind is bearable, if only so you get to see them armed to the teeth and ready to overcome the variety of challenges that lie before you with their interesting and unique game styles. The roguelike array of dungeons presents a new and unique level each time and it can be enjoyable to figure out your strategy as Rezrog throws everything it has at you in any given scenario. Despite all tedium, running into new creatures and casting new spells for the first time are amusing little circumstances to come across in the game.Unfortunately, Rezrog doesn’t change it up enough to keep the challenge increasingly interesting or constant. The music loops, the same tactics work over and over, the same threats are dispatched, and you either win or have your heart broken by narrow defeat or unlucky encounters.

Rezrog could do for an infusion of story, variety, and life to keep things interesting. Instead, it feels like a Dungeon Master using the same tricks over and over again for long stretches of time before they come up with anything new or interesting to match the interesting starting context on which it kicks off.