I created an "Archer Stormtrooper" archer, died on level 1 by shooting myself which proves this game is realistic and takes into account Star Wars lore even though it has nothing to do with Star Wars.

100% would self-stormtroop myself again.


Joke apart, don't let the graphics fool you : this game has a deep gameplay , each class really plays differently than the other, it's challenging and will keep you hooked for hours.

If you want a complex, challenging roguelike/RPG experience with plenty of lore to read and things to unlock, this is the game. Just keep in mind that this isn't a roguelike you can quickly jump into, and the campaign isn't short; it's much more of a commitment than something like Risk of Rain.

With that said, if you want a game that's easy on the eyes, look elsewhere...

A very varied RPG. Worth a try if you like this kind of Rouge likes.

Good for cheevos

I don't play rogue-likes.

That was my starting point with ToME(4), aka Tales of Maj'Eyal. I'm not really a fan of the genre, though I am a fan of tactical RPGs. It was only after some interesting comments on another game forum (Grim Dawn, great game, look it up) that I decided to give ToME a try.

Unlike some other rogue-likes, ToME gives you the option to play softcore. There are varying difficulty levels in addition to different degrees of 'rogue-like-ness' (multiple lives; from 1 to infinite). The classes vary from basic and simple (Bulwark, Rogue, Archmage, etc) to surprisingly unique (Mindslayer, Oozemancer, Solipsist, etc). The unlock system can be a pain, but it does encourage you to progress through the game, explore and play various archetypes.

The lore is great; the world has been excellently crafted (imo). While it doesn't read like a AAA novel, the depth of the backstory is pretty astonishing considering it's been done primarily by one man (props Darkgod).

When it comes to the gameplay, everything is surprisingly newbie-friendly (for a rogue-like). The UI is simple and easy, the controls are variable (keyboard and/or mouse, re-bindable) and the overly-complex item usage often found in the genre has been notably streamlined.

The graphics are solid. Now, take that with a grain of salt; this is a 2d game of tiles and sprites. If you're anticipating something like Dragon Age, you're going to be disappointed. I know that I was unpleasantly surprised. That being said, it has definitely grown on me and it certainly gives enough information on what's happening.

All that being said, this IS a roguelike. You WILL walk around a corner/open a door/open a chest and get exploded. Careful, cautious play is highly encouraged.

Overall, if you find yourself wanting to try out a roguelike but finding they are a little too 'hardcore' for you, give ToME a try. It's the only roguelike that I have found myself returning to, time after time.

I've never written a steam review before but TOME is so good that I have to chime in with my 2c. This is the first rogue-like game that I've ever played and I was extremely skeptical of the genre before giving TOME a try but I can honestly say that TOME is the best game that I've played in a very, very long time, and as a D&D nerd who grew up in the 80's, this game hits so many of the right notes from an RPG perspective that I have simply not been able to put it down since the summer sale and I've only played 2 out of the like 30 classes.

The replay value is through the roof and the challenge is out of this world difficult, but like Dark Souls, it mostly feels very fair and does become more manageable as you get better at the game. I can't believe I only paid something like 2$ for this game as it is worth the price of a full AAA title easily. In fact, if I was a developer who had slaved away on a mediocre AAA title this game would make me seriously re-evaluate my life choices. As far as I can tell, this game was developed by one dude, and stands head and shoulders above so many titles that took 100+ people to create that it should serve as an inspiration to hobby game developers everywhere. I can't believe how good this game is, you have to buy it.

Well...how to start.

First, now that I have a few games under my belt and have a least started some of the overall learning curve (there is a lot of information to digest in this game), I would like to say BRAVO to the developer. This game is for any old school RPG'er that misses great mechanics and gameplay. I cannot stress enough how engaging this game is. Anyway, I will list some of the goods and bads of the game.

• The developer, DarkGod, is very attentive to the boards and genuinely is interested in his customers. This is a positive that is almost nonexistent is most software. (Especially indy stuff.)
  
• The choice of characters/classes is vast. Yes, you have to play to unlock all of them. That is part of the fun.
  
• Character development is very customizable and detailed. For me this is a plus, for some this is the source of extreme confusion.
  
• The UI is very friendly. Although, like a lot of the game, it does have a somewhat inclined learning curve. I have been playing for 60 odd hours and I am still finding ways to use it and new things I didn't know it could do with it.
  
• The workshop support is tremendous. You can customize this game to suit your needs.
  
• This is a Rogue Like game that has difficulty settings from casual to hard core. If you want, you CAN play with unlimited lives. Or, if you fancy a good challenge, you can play 1 life on crazy difficulty. The choice is yours. (I read a few reviews complaining that they died too quick. So set it on easy and learn to play; it is that simple.)
  
• Tremendous amount of trophies. One ninth of them are very gettable for anyone. (The trophes are copied nine times for different levels of play. And, yes, if you do higher level trophies they will get all the same trophies below them. You just have to do a little dance to have it happen. If an old fart like me can figure it out (I read posts) then I imagine most people can do the same.)
  
• The story is not bad at all. Far more engaging than most much more expensive games. If you think it is boring and unimaginative you probably haven't actually read and/or played through much of it.

• No, this game is not perfect. The biggest drawback, from some people's view, is the graphics. They are very yesterday, yesteryear, last decade possibly. (For me this is not that big of a deal, I will gladly trade eye-candy for good gameplay.)
  
• I have experienced some game lag in different parts of the game. Not sure what causes them, but they are surely there. I have never had it crash, but I have had to wait 30-90 seconds for it to come out of an apparent mini-freeze.
  
• This game can be unflinchingly mean and nasty at higher levels. For some this is a deal breaker. For me it is a lot of fun. So do with that what you want. (I have read many blog/posts about people rage quitting and never playing again. For those people...never play Magic the Gathering, you will end up hating life and your friends.)
  
• The UI is very friendly. Although, like a lot of the game, it does have a somewhat inclined learning curve. Yes, I know this was listed in my "Goods," but it is most definitely a negative for a lot of people.
  
• Kind of gets in the way of life if you get into it. It is a "just one more turn/zone/thingy type game that will overtake your life if you let it.

That is all that I can think of off the top of my head. I have an old head. (And, most of the other parts as well.) So, in closing, get the game. It is too cheap and well made to not have it in your library. If this is formatted incorrectly, I humbly apologize for my oldness and lack of modern techno-goodness; it has been years since I "formatted" anything and I imagine quite rusty.

[posted this initially on the 3rd but reviews were broken at that time.]

I'll start this by telling you that I've been playing TOME since it was Tales of Middle Earth. That's right, originally it was based on Tolkien's work and was an offshoot of a long lineage of games directly related to Rogue, via Moria and then Angband. There was a middle variant in there at some point called Pernband.

Some back story:
At some point DarkGod (the main dev) decided to rewrite the client because the old angband client was full of spaghetti code and it became untenable. So came t-engine. Tome was then written as a module of T-engine (all made by DarkGod for no $$ I might add.)

In Tome 3 there were Jedi!!! and other fun ideas but it was chaotic. Tome 3 was a mess, (Tome 4 was much cleaner.) But it was still pretty opaque as Roguelikes go. I would tinker with it, have fun with lost souls etc and then get bored. So I went the way of many players got involved in other games only came back periodically when I got a yen for playing with Lightsabers again. At some point, I noticed Tome 4 was progressing and downloaded and everything was different.

Gone were most of the touches of the Angband and Tolkien worlds. You can still see a few here and there but TOME had become Tales Of Maj Eyal with an original story and a total reworking of the graphics and mechanics. On and off Ive done some beta testing (though my forums account from then was deleted more than once so I guess being inactive on the forums is a good way to get culled.)

At some point I managed a couple of end games. I won once and once I sacrificed my guy (I still don't know why that doesn't count as a win...)

Every time I came back more and more stuff was added and then I saw that they had finally made the leap to Steam. I wanted to buy it immediately because I believe in the game and the devs and why not support them? But I was reticent with all the other games I have and also had to wait for money to pay for it anyway.

I probably should not have waited but I did and when I did finally get the steam version I was not disappointed with either the basic game or the DLC (which I had no previous knowledge of.)

Divergent note that tangentially relates to this review:
Bob Dylan has said on songwriting that if you can't change a song, if you can't mess with the words or change the arrangements it is dead and you should bury it. That is a paraphrase because I don't have the exact quote on hand. But this is how I feel about games. TOME is a living game, always changing.

Many pay to play games are not. They merely make some stuff they took out initially available for DLCs when the wells run dry. TOME is not like those games. TOME is developed by a caring group of dedicated players and programmers who are making an epic play experience.

Yes epic. You have a ton of races and classes which unlock as you play. Sometimes the unlock is just something you were going to do anyway but sometimes in true RPG fashion you have to investigate and figure out some puzzle or quest to get the unlock you want. And you can unlock them in something like 9 different modes. The game offers 50 levels of experience in whatever build combo you choose. As you learn more about classes and races you find yourself getting deeper into the decision making process and you realize you have many more choices than you will quickly be able to play with. This could take a long time. As is without any further changes. And the game changes from game to game so you may not always get an event or area you thought you might. And different play styles create vastly different approaches and in-game storylines.

There was a lot of discussion when Maj'Eyal became the world of the game about how terribly difficult the game was (is) so now there are multiple modes for discovering the game. The most rewarding depends on your personality and proclivities as a gamer. You can play with Easy and Exploration and virtually never risk death, or you can unlock, insanity and madness modes and play only in true Roguelike fashion (1 life, though there are items you can find to hedge that bet.) Or you could play as I do on Normal with Adventurous. To each player their own. This is an innovation I wish more devs would think about. Multiple play modes for multiple types of players means more fun for everyone.

The game has a few pit falls. It is deep so it is not hard to get into trouble if you are tired, hungry or bored. Don't do that. Play when you are fresh and excited and keep it that way. You won't complete it in a day. (The main quest line takes a minimum of 10 hours I think if you skip everything else and I highly recomend you don't do that.)

You may also find that the game lore is hard to penetrate. This is partially due to writing style and partially because who wants to read so much of it? Yes you should read the lore the first time you encounter it at the very least. You may or may not glean valuable clues from it but if you need to you can go back to it later. Once you have unlocked certain features you will be able to access ALL of the lore you've ever seen as a player.

You may notice that I am not giving a lot of specifics here because part of the fun of this game is playing it unspoiled. You can of course look stuff up or ask for spoilers if you aren't into all that.

I will say the sound effects while fairly professional are not my cup of tea. I am not really a game sounds kind of player though. I typically turn sound off in games I play and I only checked them out in TOME out of curiousity. You might find them entertaining. Apparently, also there is music. Something I didn't check out. (I am an older guy with a very staid taste in music. If it isn't Classic Rock. Folk, Blues or Soul from the 60s-70s then it probably isn't on my mp3 player. Though I do enjoy more varied styles, when I am gaming that's mainly what I listen to.)

I write all this mainly to enthuse about how much I am enjoying playing TOME again and want you to know it is worth every penny to buy it on steam. The community addons alone make the game extremely customizable.

Gandolfo in game chat, Winter Wolf on Steam.

If you're already a roguelike fan, chances are you've played this game - and probably enjoyed it. So for the purposes of this review I'm going to assume you're had little to no experience with traditional roguelikes, and perhaps some experience with "Roguelites" such as Binding of Isaac, FTL, Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain, or Spelunky (not an exhaustive list). These games share some similarities with more traditional roguelikes in that they feature procedural level generation, perma-death and often have steep difficulty curves... but are blended with other genres such as platformer or top-down action. Tales of Maj'Eyal is, however, a more traditional roguelike due to the way you control your character.

Turn-based games are typically seen as boring and time-consuming for obvious reasons, but in ToME (and in many other traditional roguelikes) everything is literally instantaneous. You can take turns as quickly as you want, you can move your character and issue commands as fast as you and your computer can process. There is no waiting for fancy character animations to finish playing. Enemies move as you move, so you don't need to wait for them to take a turn. In fact, something I love about ToME is that there is essentially no 'grinding'. You level up, you find items, you go through the game in a mostly linear fashion (although you can choose which order you do dungeons in), but around every corner awaits the possibility of death. Whether you are level 1 or maxed out, there is a potential for you to die if you make a mistake.

ToME is a tactical strategy game at heart. Very few deaths will happen because of bad luck, most of them will be a result of mistakes (usually a series of them). This is made possible because there is a plethora of escape options and vision scouting abilities, ensuring that luck plays no part in your experience. As you play you will encounter 'rare' monsters which have a wider range of abilities than most, often requiring you to play very carefully and think out every move you make. Excluding your primary damage-dealing abilities, nearly every ability your character has is for a unique purpose: faster movement, teleports, swapping positions, stunning, healing, shielding, evading, removing effects, and so on. Character positioning and knowing when and how to use your skills is the key to sucess in this game.

The basic gameplay is solid due to the strategy elements, but the variety of character customization and items you can find is where the real excitement comes from. There's quite a lot of different classes and races to choose from, many of which have very unique playstyles. Each character's passive and active abilities can be leveled up point-by-point so you can customize exactly what they're capable of, and you cannot max out everything so you must decide what works best for you. As you progress into the game, you'll find items with a huge list of modifiers and special traits. You will constantly be comparing two items and thinking about which is better, especially weapons. How much base damage a weapon deals is rarely the deciding factor in whether or not you will use it, as each individual item can have dozens of different effects and stat changes you to consider. The level of customization depth adds an incredible amount of replay value to the game.

The game's aesthetics, however, are not great. I mean the graphics are decent... for a roguelike, a genre that is often associated with graphics consisting of colored ascii characters and nothing else. But I won't beat around the bush on this one: the graphics look pretty bad when compared to almost anything else. And I don't just mean low quality, I mean the art style is terrible. Generic uninspired fantasy crap. The screen is often cluttered with ugly doodads and bulky objects, enemy sprites look ridiculous, I honestly feel most people will take one look at the game and go "This game looks like trash. I am not playing that." - and I don't blame you. I just hope you can look past the terrible aesthetics to find the beautiful game within. You know, inner beauty.

Above all, ToME is free. You can download the full base game from their website, and if you enjoy it you can purchase a copy of it on steam (or throw the developer a direct donation). The game is consistently updated, has full mod support, and has an website that tracks all of your character data and allows you to look up other players to compare. Although the base game is free, ToME has a couple of DLC 'expansion packs' that are only available for purchase, but these are HUGE content packs for people who love the base game and want more stuff to tinker with.

I recommend this game to anyone who has enough patience to get past the learning curve.
Rating: A

A traditional roguelike for the modern age. Amazing design, great class customization, extensive opportunities for theory-craft, huge replayability.

I've been transfixed by this game for a long, long time. I can't recommend it enough!