OFFICIAL Ziggurat (Review)

[RCoon]

Introduction

Ziggurat is a First Person Dungeon-crawler rogue-like game, developed and published by Milkstone Studios. The game uses the Unity engine. You could say it’s a modern rogue-like version of Heretic and HeXen games, with slightly more comprehensible maps, although they are all procedurally generated. Though your character can only hold 4 weapons at once, and you lose all progress on death, as well as the fact you cannot go back to a later floor after completing the previous one. I’m not 100% sure if something like this exists, particularly with this kind of quality on Unity. The graphical style is similar to that of Orc Must Die, although the monsters are varied and are extremely reminiscent of the original DOOM games. Floating skulls mainly.

Storyline

The storyline is wholly unnecessary I feel, and while it’s there, it’s shoehorned. The game is of the genre and style that the story is irrelevant. Nonetheless, the general gist of it is that you are to become a neophyte sorcerer. In order to do so, you must prove your character’s worth by completing all the challenges in the Ziggurat. Although even when you complete the game, you can continue to do so with other characters, one of which doesn’t even unlock until you finish the game. But all that doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. You can shiny balls of light and things die – as do you.

Gameplay

It’s an awfully simple concept of a game, and I’ve been waiting for somebody to do a remake of HeXen and Heretic for years. I even considered taking on the project myself, Heretic was a big thing for me, and with a shiny engine surely people would want to play it. Ziggurat is however a rogue-like, so there’s no persistence of progress besides unlocking extra power-up cards to have a chance of getting in your next playthrough. There are a similar amount of weapons too, although they are all largely similar to each other, and you can only ever carry 4 specific types at once.

There are 4 weapons types, the first being your wand, which is not interchangeable. The others, Staves, Spell books and Alchemy are your interchangeable weapons. There are 5 staves and 6 of the other two weapon types. Often you’ll level up and be able to choose a power-up that increases a specific type of weapon damage, and may perhaps reduce another. Each weapon performs somewhat differently, although there is a lot of overlap in design on a few. Generally it’s the Alt fire that sets each weapon apart, some being heavily AOE based, other focusing on single target damage. It’s really down to you to choose the correct weapon on the fly (and pray you have the mana to fire it).

There are also a number of characters, about a dozen, all of which have different stat improvements for certain weapons or perks for in game mechanics, including but not limited to health and mana pools, as well as damage adjustments. You’ll start off with a basic character, and slowly unlock a slew of others based on achievements, such as completing one playthrough successfully, or dealing a certain amount of alchemy based damage - Basically a mechanic to make you play the game multiple times to unlock various characters, as well as power-up cards. In terms of power-ups, enemies drop experience orbs, and you pick them up to fill the bar. Once it’s filled, you choose between two power-ups that will persist through your game. The further you get, the more interesting the cards get, sometimes forcing you to trade off a number of things. Each time you die you’ll unlock more power-up cards to be added to the random pool it chooses from.

As well as the cards, there are also loot chest rooms, as well as puzzle rooms. These are totally random, and provide random loot. There are also shrine offering rooms, which will ask you to sacrifice health, sacrifice nothing, or totally randomise your weapon load out. Sometimes these sacrifices will pay off, others not so much. Sometimes it’s best to just play it safe, but sometimes it’s worth it for the sheer amusement to see how you can screw yourself next time. Some of the puzzles are excruciatingly frustrating, often looking simple, but first person platforming isn’t always as easy as it looks. It was necessary to add these puzzles though; otherwise I think the gameplay would be somewhat bland.

From the start screen, you hit play and choose your character from the row of many, and select the only one you can unless you’ve previously unlocked a few. Once you do, you’re dropped straight into Floor 1, with a wand and a random weapon floating in front. Hopefully you get a good one, I’ve had some great Floor 1 runs, and some pretty abysmal ones because I suck at it. From here you usually get a choice of which door in the room to go through. This is the case with most rooms; each one will have at least one door unless it’s the end of that path. Paths usually end with either a loot room, a boss key room, or finally a boss room, with the occasional flat out dead end. You can however open the gate and take a peek in the room before charging in and realising it was a dead end, although the map won’t fully reveal all doors until you’re locked in and fending off various carrots and mushrooms (super serious).

You must fight you way through all the rooms in search for the key to summon the boss, and then make it directly to the boss room. After killing enemies you’ll get your experience to unlock power-ups, and finally make it to the boss room. Bosses are random, and have their own mechanics and gameplay style. Most of them do some stupendous AOE damage, and boss fights generally involve a hell of a lot of jumping about and strafing while unleashing all possible alt fire damage on all your weapons between each second of breathing room. Once you’ve killed the boss, you jump through the portal to the next floor of the Ziggurat, shortly after a score screen. If you die, your points are tallied, and you get to see the various power-ups you’ve unlocked during that playthrough, as well as any characters you’ve unlocked due to meeting requirements. You then get to start all over again for eternity. Or at least until I got desperate to play Grim Dawn again.

Controls

Standard WASD for movement, click to shoot, and right click for Alt fire. Shift is run; however I’ve noticed jumping straight after Shift running slows your movement down to standard speed which is a little off. You’ve also got 1-4 for your obtained weapon choices, as well as the “E” key in the event you pick up a shiny trinket or skill card.

Video Settings

God almighty, find the FOV before you start playing. The original FOV is catastrophically bad. Because the FOV is not in the video settings, where I think it should be, I played for an hour and felt suitably sick playing for any longer. Eventually after having googled how to ham fist some FOV options, it turns out that they’re in the Game Settings menu. Do that first and foremost, otherwise you’ll have a wholly unpleasant experience. But thank you Milkstone for having FOV, it’s more than some can say. In terms of the actual graphics options menu, things are certainly limited. Motion blur was immediately turned off because it made my eyes go all hazy and weird. Nothing fancy beyond all those usual gubbins.

System Performance

CPU: i5 4670 (Stock)
GPU: MSI GTX 970 (Stock)
RAM: 16GB 2133mhz
Storage: WD 1TB 7200RPM
Display: 2560 x 1440

Hundreds of frames, the game is beautifully optimised, not a shred of stutter or catastrophic frame drops. Then again, it’s a basic dungeon FPS running on a rather high end system. I rather hoped for a few hundred frames.

1440p

Spoiler

1080p

Spoiler

Conclusion

I was foolishly hoping for a spiritual successor to Heretic, but the screenshots and my lack of understanding the depth of the rogue-like status disappointed me slightly. In every case it pretty much matches the general gameplay with the exception of the limit on weapons equipped. There are a number of weapons that feel nice and varied, and significantly powerful. They also unleash a wonderful lighting display. In the first couple of floors the weapons I’d get seemed to be pretty much the same thing over and over, so I’d have liked to see a touch more variation on the random drops.

The enemies are wholly ridiculous, including angry rabid demon carrots, and curious looking poison spitting flamingos, but it makes for a bit of creativity in an otherwise repetitive game. The game is exceptionally challenging, but very easily understood and learned. I for one am not an overt fan of the rogue-like genre, but there’s a special place in my steam library for these types of dungeon-y FPS games, like that of Hard Reset. Having to start entirely over from the beginning is not a negative, but more of a hardcore style rogue-like, whereas games like Crypt of the Necrodancer allowed a little bit of persistence for those of us that can’t bare the repetition.

It’s a wonderful amalgamation of Heretic and rogue-like, and makes for a great way to kill an hour of spare time in mindless slaughter and pretty lights, but the game doesn’t quite hold up for a whole evening or even a week’s worth of evenings play. I can quite easily see myself dropping in for a blast now and then, but it hasn’t struck me as the kind of game that would go on my go-to-games list.

Ziggurat is available on Steam for £10.99/$14.99