Meritous
Genre: One Button Monochromatic Action RPG
Platform: Windows
Developed by: Lancer-X/ASCEAI
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The Scoop: Meritous is basically a Rogue-like (ie dungeon crawler) for people that don’t like Rogue-likes. It does away with the slow-paced, super difficult combat, but keeps the huge, randomly generated world and character leveling.
The realtime combat is probably the biggest hallmark of the title, despite the fact that *only* the spacebar is used. Basically, you hold down Space to charge up a psi attack, and release to unleash it. Simple. The longer the charge, the farther away you’ll damage enemies. There’s no guesswork involved, though. As you charge up your psi, you’ll see a targeting reticle appear over enemies, which indicates that they’ll be destroyed by your next blast.
Although it is quite simple, the combat has a very nice feel to it. The psi charge requires just the right amount of time (usually only a second or two) to allow you to get into a great zen-like rhythm. Enter room, charge, release, mop up, repeat. It’s simple, but it really does work.
Every enemy you kill leaves behind crystals that can be spent to increase the power of your protagonist, allowing you to dive further into the dungeon. These more remote rooms contain tougher enemies that in turn leave behind more crystals – thus your standard dungeon crawl gameplay loop is complete. Crystals can be spent on thickening your psi barrier (allowing you to absorb more enemy attacks before taking damage), as well as reducing the charge-up and cool down time of your sole psi attack.
Although Meritous randomly generates a dungeon of 3,000 rooms and 10,000 enemies, it does so within the confines of its game structure. The adventure does have a point and purpose. To complete the game you’ll need to collect artifacts from boss rooms in a specific order.
Meritous is a big, big adventure. The game keeps a running tally of your enemies destroyed and rooms explored, and after playing for the better part of an evening I had eliminated 2,000/10,000 enemies. The experience gets repetitive, but what Rogue-like doesn’t? Meritous scores major points for daring to ask why dungeon crawlers are the way they are, and for trying (with success) to go in a different direction.
(12 votes, average: 4.58 out of 5)
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Links:
Wikipedia Entry
Youtube Clip
Play This Thing! Review
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2 Responses to “Meritous”
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just wanted to drop in and say that i absolutely love this blog and i try to make it a point to visit every day. great concept, great writing, great games. keep doin’ it man, keep doin’ it!
- b
Finally beat this game today. I was stuck on the third boss for a long time.
Funny enough, the last boss turned out to be much easier. Really weird how it suddenly throws all that text at you, though. I think I liked it better when I was kind of constructing my own story.