Kobold Slayer

Waited weeks for this to go on sale, it looked fun. Picked it up on sale and glad I did. Fun game, after spending an hour making characters and dungeon delving the game is broken and freezes when you rest to level up your characters. Until the issue is fixed don't buy the game on sale or not. If the issue is solved, buy it. It has some fun character portraits and though it feels a lot like a mix of several RPG's from the past its fun. Again DO NOT BUY until the resting and level up feature is fixed.

PAID $2.49, on sale from normal $4.99.

As the first review said, this is a "shameless Wizardry clone" -- Wizardry 1 in design, that is, with graphics that are more like Wizardry 5 or 6. You start in "Town", which is a static screen with an interface showing choices of Tavern (make and equip characters, rearrange party), Inn (resting), Temple (resurrection, etc), Shop (gear) and a way to leave town to hit the dungeon.I knew from previous Wizardry experience that I needed to make some characters and add them to the party, so I went to the tavern.

The interface was old-school, using mostly arrow keys and the ESC key, but easy enough to figure out. Character creation entailed making a name (some trouble here, every new character starts with the name ANON, and backspacing doesn't remove the A, N, O, N; you have to press ESC to delete a letter), then choosing a trait such as "Strong" or "Smart" which boosted starting stats, then finding out how many bonus points you rolled, and boosting a set of basic stats (Strength, Agility, Luck, etc) that determined which classes were available to that character. The classes were the same as those available in the Wizardry series, including Bishop, Samurai and Ninja.

My bonus rolls were usually between 5 and 9 points, except once I rolled 19 points. This ruined me for making subsequent characters, and I spent a lot of time re-rolling to get high bonus point amounts. These seemed to entail a small chance at a double or even triple roll; I saw 5-9, and then 15-19, all the way up to 26.

The screenshots showed a party of 4, so I tried to leave town after making a part of four. "I should visit the Tavern first", the game told me. So I tried six. Same. It was only after making a party of 8 was I able to leave town and enter the dungeon. Yet when I got inside, only four character portraits were displayed. After some experimenting, I found that only the first four characters you added at the Tavern comprised your party, but you needed to make and add 8 (overwrite the first slot -- the game seems to require at least one character, as it will not let you delete them all).

I started roaming the level, which had the exact same layout as Wizardry 1, at least at the start -- if you turn right and go down the hall, a few steps down and just before the dead end is a door in the left. There was nothing in there, so I wandered some more. It was on my 4th door that I had an encounter, with 5 imps.

Imps are small. Imps are easy, right? Nope. I was only able to give combat commands to the four characters showing on the screen, and was wiped out and GAME OVER by the second round. When I went back to the tavern, I had zero characters available because I hadn't saved.

I ALMOST quit to refund at this point, but it occurred to me that I hadn't checked starting equipment. You do need to visit the shop and buy and equip some gear after making a party. You get 500 bonus gold per character created, and the basic gear you can buy in the shop raises your stats quite a bit.

The adventuring went more smoothly after this. The game can still be unfair; a party of 5 imps will absolutely wreck your party, and running away as the manual suggests for such early encounters is not always successful. But it was fun in an old school, low budget way, and 100% stable, without a single crash.

Still, the balance is wacky. The best way to make gold is to repeatedly create and delete new characters, as you get 500 gold per character created. And I also found myself repeatedly deleting them as they leveled up, because the stat increases (and even decreases!) seem about as random as the bonus points allocations you get during creation.

There's also zero story, not even a pretense.

It does what it promises, however, and I'll recommend at the low price point, for hard-core genre fans who have extra graph paper they need to burn.

A really shameless wizardry clone. Almost everything is a clone of it and it seems, that there are even no new ideas at the game.

This is nothing wrong, better a good clone that a wizardry game that is made worse with bad ideas.
But the game itself is made with RPG Maker, the visuals dont really match (it seems to be made of different free art styles).
The most confusing thing are the char portraits at the dungeon crawling. Too big and they reduce the screen a lot.

The controls are not good either.

The balancing seems bad too. I walked into the dungeon, almost 10 minutes without any fight. Then finally a fight (one enemy). Then the next step the next fight. Again an easy one. Then a new step the next fight. Impossible one, i got killed from 5 other enemies at the first round.

Bad controls, bad mismatching art style and it seems no balancing at all.

The game is cheap, i like hard games and the old wizardry style.
So i will give the game a new chance at my next holidays.
Maybe i give it a thumps up later, but i doubt it. This feels like a rushed game without any real soul or investment. Like a programmer has simply used a real good formula (wizardry) and put it together with all free or cheap media that he or she could found.