The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
I would have never thought after all my years of living that I would love a game as much as I love this one.
I gave Flash Isaac a try after getting my ass kicked in Enter The Gungeon because of the similar styles and it was also collecting dust in my steam library. It was all down hill from there.
It’s definitely a game you’re going to have to put some time and dedication in and through all the blood, sweat, and tears you’ll find that this game is just a gem.
Endless gameplay, awesome community, mods, and so much more.
– Real player with 796.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action Roguelike Replay Value Games.
Father of all roguelikes.
Part 1: Introduction.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is one of the best roguelikes ever in the industry (Thanks to Edmund McMillen). In the game you will see many unique bosses, items, characters, procedurally generating locations and much more that you will find yourself during the passage.
Part 2: Difference from other games of a similar genre.
Unlike other roguelikes, this project has a deep history of its creation. Most of all I remember that in the game each passage is like a new one and this causes excitement in you, because you think: “What will happen next?”
– Real player with 508.9 hrs in game
Dead Estate
I think it speaks to the strength of this game that I got the true ending with a broken run before I unlocked all the characters and I’m taking a break to write this review before going back in again.
Dead Estate is a fun little isometric roguelike akin to an Enter the Gungeon or diamond shaped Isaac. You go in, fight enemies, pick up weapons and items, die to bosses, unlock new stuff, rinse and repeat. I don’t really need to tell you the basics of this kind of game. There are multiple playable characters with their own default weapons, stats and strengths/weaknesses. I will give it to them, once you start heading away from the starting characters they do come up with some pretty unique gimmicks. Gotta say, the one involving money is a personal favorite.
– Real player with 39.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action Roguelike Replay Value Games.
As someone who really didn’t care for the genres gold standards “Binding of Isaac” and “Gungeon” i just thought that maybe this style wasn’t for me. Then i saw this game and something clicked as i started to play. It was actually fun, not just in the gameplay sense but in how it handles it’s own presentation. Everything is vibrant and colorful being overall very pleasing to look at, the characters and stages all have a level of charm and personal touches that make them stand apart, and the music is fairly simple but charmingly retro and fits very well with the tone of the game. Add to all that a wholesome and strange story that you will continue to discover through multiple runs and you have the recipe for one of the best Twin-Stick Rougelikes in the genre. The game is worth every penny and with the promise of more content to come I honestly cannot recommend this game enough.
– Real player with 27.4 hrs in game
Nuclear Throne
(scroll down for tl;dr)
I love this game. I love it so much that I have nearly 500 hours into it. I wouldn’t so much call this a review, just some (hopefully) objective experiences I personally had for the game I love so much while explaining a bit of the game in general.
Characters
Nuclear Throne sports a roster of 12 playable characters, diverse with their own unique passive and active ability. From shielding to bullet-time, to air strikes to rolling, every character offers up a variable play-style each go around. The art for the game suits the game’s overall direction and is generally nice to look at. Remember this is still early access: We’ve had some hilarious placeholder ms-paint stick-figure art that would be redrawn into worthwhile, lovely pixel portraits. You can watch the developer stream to see just how great the art assets become as it’s being done live.
– Real player with 1450.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action Roguelike Pixel Graphics Games.
If you like fast-paced, randomly generated rogue-likes, then this is the perfect game for you. Nuclear Throne is another great game by one of my favorite developer teams, Vlambeer. You’re a mutant stuck in the wasteland with all of your friends, and you’ve all heard the tale of the Nuclear Throne. Some think it’s a bunch of baloney, others think that it really exists, and a few mutants are going to go out of their way to get to it. You are one of those few mutants. One of those few mutants, who is also really well balanced with the other mutants in terms of power.
– Real player with 466.9 hrs in game
The Binding of Isaac
49 Cent doing a sale?
Play this
enjoy it
then go straight to the remake
enjoy that too
Favorite Roguelike series
– Real player with 249.6 hrs in game
where’s your god now huh
**Actual Review:
This game has (for a former flash game) really nice graphics, banger soundtracks (Basement 1 is op imo), smooth controls (uses arrow keys and wasd or wasd and mouse, don’t waste your time on shooting with mouse man.) and performance. I love that the story is much deeper than what you thought when you first started playing, I won’t say too much but Christianity is involved. TBOI has a big replay value because of the endless combination of various items found in the dungeons and multiple characters with different starting items and health variations that get unlocked by playing the game in specific manners like getting different endings (for example to not spoiler anyone who hasn’t had the opportunity to experience this wonderful game) plus almost every play through is different from the last. TBOI is also really balanced in difficulty, getting harder the further you explore and it actually gets wanna be the boshy hard near the end, especially if you have a bad run and your found items are bullsh… . Biggest Pro though: who does not want to shoot tears (or something else ;3 ) at poop
! and your insane, murderous and obese mum? ?**
– Real player with 158.4 hrs in game
Risk of Rain
it’s mid
– Real player with 649.6 hrs in game
A fun game with great pixel art and fantastic music. Short enough to play any time, with enough random factors to keep it interesting. I found the baseline enemies to be a bit too spongy for my liking, so I play exclusively with the Artifact of Glass enabled. IMHO this game did not translate particularly well into 3D for RoR2, and so I keep finding myself playing this one, the original.
– Real player with 259.1 hrs in game
Spelunky
At it’s core, Spelunky is a precise 2D platformer, with a very simple yet elegant scoring mechanic. Each level through which you descend is littered with treasure, and your objective is to get to the end of the game, beat the boss, and escape with as much gold as you can carry with you. This would get a bit boring if the levels were the same every time, so instead the layout of the platforms, items, and enemies changes every time you retry, although the four themed areas (plus one special, secret one) always appear in the same order. Interestingly, in this version, there is a daily challenge: a seed is generated and every one who attempts the daily challenge will play the same seed, and the scores are ranked at the end. Best I’ve achieved is twelfth in the world. Mind you, the disparity between my score and that of the person in pole position was enormous.
– Real player with 474.7 hrs in game
Spelunky is an exquisitely designed hybrid roguelike/platformer that is simple to learn, but very difficult to master. Often a single mistake from certain death, you must depend on your own skills and knowledge to progress through the procedurally generated caves, uncovering the treasures and secrets that lie below. Death comes often, especially to newcomers, but every death is a learning experience that improves your chances of survival in subsequent attempts.
Spelunky is a game that is simultaneously merciless and fair. Even with multitude of threats you’ll face, almost every death you experience is preventable and the result of poor judgment or a lack of skill. All of Spelunky’s mechanics and enemies follow a persistent and predictable logic, each element a tiny cog in a massive interlocking machine. Learning about the inner workings of Spelunky’s world is necessary to venture into the deeper reaches of the caves.
– Real player with 448.0 hrs in game
Teleglitch: Die More Edition
Teleglitch is an anomaly. That’s a play on words, based on the ever-present black goo that engulfs every corner of this game. But seriously folks, I have put in quite a bit of undocumented hours into Teleglitch: Die More Edition and have yet to beat it. So my perspective is from someone who hasn’t beat level 6 yet.
I say it’s an anomaly, because so many reviews describe it as repetitive, esoteric, self-indulgent, and impossible, and yet so many describe it as more horrifying and entertaining than any other game they’ve played. From my point of view– it’s a little of both. But, in the end I side with the latter.
– Real player with 135.9 hrs in game
_EDIT: A week or two after writing my review, I finally beat Teleglitch DME. In the process, I learned something that affects my review: it seems the charm of Teleglitch is the way that it becomes your gaming Arch-Nemesis. It mocks and sneers at you while committing heinous crimes, daring you to stop it. You become driven by your hate to defeat it… and hate keeps a man alive . Or at least refusing to stay dead.
NOTE: The following is not a simple “buy/don’t buy” review, but more of an investment guide. There’s a “buy/don’t buy” verdict at the bottom, but it doesn’t make much sense without the review._
– Real player with 78.1 hrs in game
Eldritch Reanimated
Eldritch is a randomly generated roguelike FPS populated by H. P. Lovecraft’s creations.
You start off in a library hub (a safe zone which is not randomly generated), from where you can go to different worlds: Dagon. Nyarlathotep, and R’lyeh. Each progressively more challenging. In each world your main goal is to descend 3 levels until you retrieve an orb, and then return to the library. In the library, you can place each orb on a pedestal, and unlock the final world, “The Endless Library”. Reaching the end of this world, completes the game, and unlocks New Game+ for future runs.
– Real player with 24.7 hrs in game
Do you like stoning fish-men to death with big rocks? I know I do! But if you’re like me, it’s a private pleasure and no one must know. So you creep out at night, ducking behind cover, keeping low to the ground, slowly rotating your irregular bit of rock (sedimentary perhaps), finding the grip to put the perfect english on it, listening for the hop-hop sounds of the fish-man as you slowly peak out, glancing briefly to see that his dopey face is turned away revealing his moist, tender cranium…
– Real player with 24.6 hrs in game
Roguelands
FRESHLY UPDATED REVIEW
PHEW wipes sweat from forehead I have now hit about 850+ hours as of this updated review from my last, most of my gameplay time was from me searching for bugs and reproducing them so I could have Sean fix them. I have posted my old review under this one; if you would like to read it, feel free to but it’s pretty much the same thing lol. Roguelands recently released as a full game and believe me when I say; the amount of content that was pumped into this game from day 1 is absolutely mind boggling. There is so much content that you could play for hours on end. I’ll through a couple of PROS and CONS below.
– Real player with 1097.6 hrs in game
Honestly, I can’t recommend this game at all. Yes I have a lot of time on it, yes the base game is enjoyable, but the developer is just such an idiot that it makes the game painful to try to enjoy.
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The text box for characters is awful and despite a billion people crying out for him to fix it, he refuses to. The text doesn’t even make sense either once it’s repeated 10 times in a row.
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Combat feels clunky. You want to chug those potions to save your ass, right? Well, you gotta get out of combat mode and mindlessly hop around to actually do that without being able to fight back.
– Real player with 180.1 hrs in game
Legend of Dungeon
Not Quite Legendary
Legend of Dungeon = Roguelite-lite + Commodore 64 + Rainbow Vomit
This game reminds me of action games back on the ol' Commodore 64. I make this reference even though I know it will plainly sail straight over the heads of most of you youngsters, making me feel like the aging and increasingly irrelevant gaming hipster that I am. sigh
Uh, anyway. The premise of this game is very Rogue. IE - Journey to the bottom of the randomly generated dungeon to collect the frazzledazzled THING and return for ultimate glory. Unlike Rogue, it is very light on the RPG mechanics. You collect glowing experience orbs from fallen enemies and gain levels which translates into direct health and damage increases. There is no stat or skill management whatsoever.
– Real player with 33.5 hrs in game
Legend of Dungeon is a permadeath roguelike dungeon-crawler game. Every time you play, it is a different dungeon. It is never the same dungeon unless you input the same seed. The objective of this game, you need to navigate your way down to level 26 to grab a treasure and bring it back to level 0 to complete the game. You will come across a variety of monster mobs and 7 different bosses to kill. Once you grab a treasure at level 26, heading back to level 0, you’ll find difficult mobs existing at all levels. This is identical to Impossible mode except it is not that way at start. The difficulty of this game is relatively easy (considering my guide) but there is Impossible mode where you’ll deal with potential powerful monster mobs right away starting Level 1 instead of deep in the dungeon.
– Real player with 30.8 hrs in game