Reply With QuoteI'm really enjoying Pocket RPG. It's a really clever take on the standard 3D dual stick RPG. I'm playing through as the Dark Archer now, but I'll probably go through again as the melee warrior class too.
Each world is broken into 3-5 randomly generated maps. As you progress through those maps, you level up, collect loot and gold, and face off against a boss at the end. Pretty standard stuff up to that point. Once you beat a world though, the game totals up all of your inventory, map times, achievements and converts it all to gold. Whatever level you managed to achieve is converted into that amount of skill points (i.e. you finished as level 12, you get 12 skill points).
Then, you are given the chance to unlock skills, which are persistant passive abilities and special moves, and spend your gold to unlock item classes, which means they will then be added to the loot tables on the next world. It sounds kind of complicated but it's presented in a really slick and intuitive way.
And to top it all off, any unspent gold, skill points and all of your earned levels are reset to zero when you start the next world, and you begin the process again. At first I was a little upset by this, but they manage to retain a sense of progression through your unlocked skills, and the loot you unlock for the game gets better and better as you progress.
Oh, also, death = restart, but you retain your unlocks and skills.
Inventory and combat are also really quite cool. You can equip 4 items - a weapon, a ring, an amulet and a projectile (arrows in the case of the archer). The archer enters 'focus' mode after a bit of sustained combat, which summons additional ghost arrows. Equipped items have modifiers and effects attached to them, so your bow might increase rate of fire and crit%, your ring might have a 'seeker' effect, making your arrows home in on hostiles, your amulet might have an ice element which has a %chance to freeze, and your arrows might be bouncers or splitters, and increase ghost arrow output by %60. Each effect family has about 5 or 6 different variants, which makes for a huge number of combinations. Tonight I was playing and it looked like a Cave shooter. So good.
Maps are quick little 2-5min romps, and thus a whole world can take anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes to beat. I've completed 5 worlds and I think there's a further 3 ahead, and then you can replay any world (re-randomized) as much as you like (there are all kinds of nice achievements to keep you coming back, exploration based, kill based, timed runs, etc). It handles beautifully, and looks completely gorgeous, and is probably one of my favourite games this year. Totally recommended - a steal at 99c.
Originally Posted by JM
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