Sorry for the triple post, but hey, here is a short review of Escape 2.0.
Gameplay: 6
It’s nothing we’ve never seen before - fight some monsters, avoid some traps, solve some puzzles and so on. For my personal taste, the balance is shifted a bit too much to the fighting aspect, and I already said much about the potential dead-end about “making it stop”, which I consider a major design flaw. Furthermore, there seems to be another dead-end, though you are warned about that. I don’t like that as I just hate dead-ends in general, but this one is announced clearly and early, so I won’t hold this against it.
The rest of the dungeon works and plays nicely. I especially liked the money-changing (something I stole for my dungeon - without actually knowing you did it first, though) and the pit-room. It’s just a bit useless to be able to “buy” some items directly in front of the boss fight, you cannot really use the nice equipment anymore.
Oh, and the gas chamber wasn’t funny.
Originality: 3
You are in a dungeon. You have to escape. But really, if we wanted originality, we wouldn’t be craving for anything looking like corridors with stone walls, would we?
Difficulty: 4
Apart from the slightly obscure “making it stop”-puzzle, there are no real problems. The puzzles are easy, the dungeon is generally very linear, and you usually have enough space to move around the monsters, with the exception of the pit room maybe and worms that may or may not regenerate quickly enough to get you into some trouble.
Puzzles: 6
The part with the Winged Keys is quite nice, especially the teleporter maze (though I found it annoying as hell at first, it wasn’t quite as bad once I started laying useless arrows and daggers around) and the lever room. Also, the timed puzzles (moving pits) work pretty well.
Size: 4
The dungeon is indeed quite small, I think I finished it in less than 4 hours.
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
But then again, I didn’t bother fighting any monsters at the start of the game.
Replayability: 3
You can choose different characters and do some little parts of it in different ways, but that’s it. Not much reason to replay this dungeon really, but that goes for most of them.
Craft: 8
Shall I mention the potential dead-end again?
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
Ok, apart from that, this is really good. The moving pits work especially well, some monster generators are placed very well, the money-changing is cool, basically, everything is fine. The Weird Walls were pretty impressive, as was the lever room with all the pits. What I like especially is the fact that you find shortcuts back up once you completed a level, making long back-tracking obsolete. I’m a huge fan of such shortcuts and thus very glad they are so excessively used.
Game Ending: 4
The boss looks nice, hits hard and moves quickly, but there are no other nuisances like pits, pillars or other monsters around. You don’t even get a hint that the boss is up ahead which is a bit sad, it’s like “Hey, who is this guy? Judging from the looks and his speed, he might be a boss… hey, does this mean I’m done in a minute?!” A bit more foreshadowing would be cool.
Atmosphere: 5
Something more of a plot, more scrolls or texts would have been nice. But the different areas do have a special feel to them, which I like.
Overall: 6
The dungeon does achieve what it is meant to do - provide a nice relaxation on a late evening that you can finish in one or two sessions. It’s short, linear, straight-forward and rather easy. You won’t have this dungeon eating your brain away like some of the heavyweights do, but if you want to simply rush through a small dungeon without getting stuck often, Escape is the right dungeon for you.
Best part:
The different paths you had to take for the Winged Keys.
Worst part:
The potential dead-end in “making it stop”.