Released yesterday after much anticipation. Thanks to a workaround the devs put in it runs flawlessly in Wine. There was previously an error in setting the graphics mode. I spent about two hours dungeon crawling last night and it hit all the right nostalgia centres of my brain.
So far my thoughts are entirely positive. It looks good, sounds good (once I figured out the Ubuntu/PulseAudio/Wine sound fix) and is a lot of fun for the old school adventurer. My one complaint so far is the leveling system: it doesn't give the same rewarding feeling as the old dungeon crawlers. It's interesting and lets you customize skills a little, but it took so long to get from level 1 to level 2 it felt a little like a chore. Like, in the old games games of this genre, you'd gain 3 or 4 levels by the end of the first dungeon (rapidly tapering off, of course), enough that whatever you were fighting in that dungeon became a trivial to beat. You start out fighting giant snails and they're really tough because you are weaponless, but even after getting weapons they're still kind of challenging. I've been playing for two hours! I should be strong enough to at least crush SOMETHING under my boot as if it were nothing. By the time I'm done, I want to feel like a god, smiting enemies left and right and only the most powerful among them offer me a true challenge. That being said, the leveling system is interesting and I am eager to see how it plays out. I'm just playing with the default characters, but I can foresee replaying it with a custom set of characters I'll care more about. I've been Xeen at least a half dozen times with different characters depending on whatever I was in to at the time.
