I've always been coming back to this game for some reason. It's a cute, simple colony-builder with a focus on creating a base for you and your minions to reside in and then subsequently raiding others. Repeat ad infinitum until all is dead and you become super powerful.
At its core, it is a perfectly-functional game that has somehow attained a good balance in both roguelike elements and in colony management.
However, it's lacking in both departments all the same to entice someone to play the game in the long-term.
Simple unit AI makes raiding high-level settlements a chore, and a lack of certain types of furniture makes the game hard to recommend for colony designers, because quite a bit of things are lacking, and for those that exist, they're purely on a functional basis.
The game's QoL is lacking. The game knows how to find all items in a stockpile, but the fact that there is no 'inventory' menu is daunting, especially when many mobs hobble their way to your repository to appropriate gear before you can assign them.
Quite frankly this becomes a logistical nightmare at later stages of the game.
The game having permadeath encourages you to finding a secondary character to act as your dungeon navigator. You could use your Keeper, but if you die, the game's gone forever (unless you force-quit by ALT+F4).
The latest update eschews most balancing in terms of snowballing in favor of other settlements upping in the difficulty curve the farther they are from your home settlement. Existence of a z-level feature is undermined by the lack of things to do in your colony.
There are performance issues as you reach 50+ units, and when you breach many, many Z-Levels downward.
Thankfully, mods exist as a good way to change up the gameplay, or augment it.
All my gripes being said, it should be noted that KeeperRL is interesting that it is one among a small list of single-developer games that managed to successfully reach a 1.0 release, so props to Michal for actually managing to do this.
Note that if you decide to mod the game yourself, the license for the tileset the game uses, which is under Oryx Design Labs, requires you to buy a $5.00 USD tileset before you're able to use derivatives on it, non-extensible.
At its core, it is a perfectly-functional game that has somehow attained a good balance in both roguelike elements and in colony management.
However, it's lacking in both departments all the same to entice someone to play the game in the long-term.
Simple unit AI makes raiding high-level settlements a chore, and a lack of certain types of furniture makes the game hard to recommend for colony designers, because quite a bit of things are lacking, and for those that exist, they're purely on a functional basis.
The game's QoL is lacking. The game knows how to find all items in a stockpile, but the fact that there is no 'inventory' menu is daunting, especially when many mobs hobble their way to your repository to appropriate gear before you can assign them.
Quite frankly this becomes a logistical nightmare at later stages of the game.
The game having permadeath encourages you to finding a secondary character to act as your dungeon navigator. You could use your Keeper, but if you die, the game's gone forever (unless you force-quit by ALT+F4).
The latest update eschews most balancing in terms of snowballing in favor of other settlements upping in the difficulty curve the farther they are from your home settlement. Existence of a z-level feature is undermined by the lack of things to do in your colony.
There are performance issues as you reach 50+ units, and when you breach many, many Z-Levels downward.
Thankfully, mods exist as a good way to change up the gameplay, or augment it.
All my gripes being said, it should be noted that KeeperRL is interesting that it is one among a small list of single-developer games that managed to successfully reach a 1.0 release, so props to Michal for actually managing to do this.
Note that if you decide to mod the game yourself, the license for the tileset the game uses, which is under Oryx Design Labs, requires you to buy a $5.00 USD tileset before you're able to use derivatives on it, non-extensible.