Swords and Magic, Black Rooms with White Dots and The Alphabet.
Brut@l is the new dungeon crawler from StormCloud Games and their take on the classic genre is a fun way to spend some time before getting really annoyed at yourself for 10 seconds.
With 4 characters to pick from, Warrior, Mage, Ranger and Amazon, they all compliment each other and none feel over or under powered. Each function in a similar way but all feel different enough; I personally love using the mage as he comes with a ranged weapon as powerful as his own default melee weapon.
Now I assume some of you dear readers would be wondering why the alphabet is up there at the front. Throughout the procedurally generated levels there are the letters of the alphabet dotted around for you to collect, the more you have then the more weapons you can craft and the more enchantments you can use on said weapons.
The only weapon that doesn’t really work (for me at least) is the Bow. It’s too slow to load, fire and not strong enough. The swords however are effortlessly smooth and deadly, I was only to play with an Axe and Hammer for a limited amount of time because I fell into the abyss. Speaking of the abyss the falling off of platforms is understandable if very annoying. You’ve just cleared a difficult room and found the key to unlock the doors and you just mistime the jump by a matter or milliseconds and your entire journey is gone.
Something Brut@l does very well is the desire to search through everything. Reminiscent of the original Legend of Zelda it’s theraputic and fun to destroy benches, chairs, chest and pots that might contain a rat or two!
There is even a clever hunger systemin Brut@l that requires you to eat food to gain hunger points back, however eating food also give you more health so decisions as to when to eat actually become quite interesting around level 3-4.
The dungeon designer is simple and could lead to really interesting custom dungeons in a variety of different ways. I couldn’t make it work because it was 2:30 in the morning and my bed looked really comfy right then.
Overall Brut@l has many good things going for it and I can imagine local co-op missions being incredibly fun. If this game turns up on PS Plus I can’t recommend it highly enough.
