Developer: Milkstone Studios
Publisher: Milkstone Studios
Rrp: £10.39 (Gog.com), £10.99 (Steam), £10.99 (Humblebundle)
Released: 23rd October 2014
Available on Steam, Gog.com, Humblebundle
Played Using: Keyboard and Mouse
Run, shoot, dodge, die. Run, shoot, dodge, run, shoot, die. Run, shoot, dodge, shoot, dodge, run, die. Welcome to roguelites, where death is only the beginning.
Ziggurat is a first person shooter roguelite, in which you play as a apprentice sorcerer who is trying to join an illustrious brotherhood of mages by passing the test of the ziggurat.
At the start of the game you can select between two characters, there are others that will become unlocked as you complete meet certain goals. Each of these unlocked characters will have a positive and negative trait to start with, keeping the game interesting for longer.
You start with only one weapon which is a wand that regenerates its ammunition, there are more weapons which you will discover as you play. Weapons come in four types; wands, spell books, staves and alchemic items, each of which use their own mana (read ammunition there). Thing is, you can only carry one of each type any weapons of the same type you find will just replace the one you currently have.
The combat feels solid and each of the weapons have a satisfying feel to them. Each weapon also has a secondary attack performed by pressing the right mouse button, this gives you some flexibility in your combat strategies. There is also the rather clever inclusion of the aiming reticule changing colour depending on how much life the enemy its on having, allowing you to prioritise targets, if your paying attention.
Enemies you kill will drop gems that come in four colours, yellow gives you experience (this is a guaranteed drop), blue, red and green give you ammunition for a specific weapon type. Sometimes they will also drop health bottles or goblets/chalices. As you can imagine the health bottle heals up some of the damage you may have sustained. The goblets/chalices give extra points at your end of level score and only help in the worldwide leaderboard.
As you collect the yellow gems you gain experience which in turn levels you up, with each level you get to choose between two perks… well in some cases not a perk so much.
At the start of the game you only have access to twenty seven perks (which occur randomly when you level up), but further perk options will be unlocked as you play.
The game has plenty of variety in weapons, enemies, room conditions, perks, and situations to keep you occupied for a long time. Throw in that occasionally the enemies will spawn what can only be called a champion (usually it glows a different colour and is bigger) that has different abilities and the combat can become quite frantic.
There are also daily challenges for you to take part in which will help you unlock more perks for your main playthrough as well as add your own score to a worldwide leaderboard. But, as you can probably guess, it isn’t called a challenge without a reason.
I wish…. I really wish I didn’t have to write this bit, but I would be remiss to not mention that on my system the game would freeze and somtimes crash as it tried to change resolution. There is a fix for this which can found on the Steam forums for the game, although the results of this fix seem to vary greatly. Sadly if your game does crash all unsaved progress is lost, and since the game essentially wipes your save with each new level….
Yeah, I’ve played the starting two levels so many times and very few of those were because of a death.
If you can get Ziggurat to run in a stable state then I would highly recommend it, sadly the constant crashes I endured have marred the experience for me, its a great shame because while it was running I enjoyed it immensely.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Hexen 2
Tower of Guns
Rogue Legacy
