Ancient Domains of Mystery
Rating:*****
Emanating from the Draklor Chain of mountains, Chaos is spreading, covering the land. Many heroes have tried to investigate the cause, but none have returned. As a fresh-faced young @ sign of a race and class of your choice, your goal is to enter the Draklor Chain, investigate and deal with the Chaos problem, and leave alive.
Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM) is a dungeon crawling game of the Roguelike sub-genre. As befits one of the big names Roguelikes it retains the random dungeon generation, randomly labeled treasure, turn based mechanics, ASCII graphics, and permanent character death that typify the sub-genre. Grinding is not encouraged as it is in the Bands, and items often have alternate uses for the clever to deduce. If this sounds awfully familiar to you Nethack fans, you would be right. However, most of ADOM's differences from Nethack are also ADOM's selling points.
Gone are the variety of don/doff commands for different types of equipment. The inventory screen presents a lettered list of slots, and pressing the appropriate key empties it or brings up a list of possible equipment, making equipment changing much smoother. Sacrificing and piety have been expanded from the 'Nethack standard', with anything from live sacrifices to gold pieces to rocks being valid fodder, and your deity dictating which gifts will be in favour and which will not. Artifacts are available in greater variety and with stranger effects than in Nethack, and a different and interesting class of 'magic' has been introduced in Mindcraft. Finally, there is ambient magical radiation in the Chain- stay there too long, and your character will start to mutate. While most mutations carry advantages as well as disadvantages, being mutated too heavily will result in transformation into a horrible Chaos blob, ending the game. This radiation gets more intense as one approaches the source and ways to remove corruption are rare. Thus, there is an anti-grinding mechanism in place, since tarrying too long gaining levels and treasure means that that character may be unable to race the 'corruption clock' to the final objective.
Other Roguelikes tend to be mostly linear- get to the bottom of the dungeon, beat the Big Bad or grab the magical mystery McGuffin, and get to the exit with your hide intact. ADOM takes another route, giving access to an overworld map with pre-placed locations, some necessary, some not. While the objective of the game is made clear to the player, the mechanism whereby this is accomplished is not. Thus, gathering information and exploring the overworld map become an integral part of the (unspoiled) game. The areas not vital to the completion of the game allow also ADOM to allow skilled players a chance to increase the risk/reward factor. For players for whom even this is old hat, there are secret endgame objectives that dramatically increase the game's difficulty for an extra challenge.
Finally, a number of changes have been made to promote greater variety in the tactics available to different characters. A great variety of skills are available to increase at level up (40 total), and of those skills, 31 are not directly related to combat. Instead, they tend more along the lines of Stealth, Herbalism, or Bridge Building- all allowing players to advance without necessarily engaging in combat. A character's race and class determine the skills available to them, further differentiating characters. Greater character customization also occurs through talents available at certain levels and at character creation, similar to Fallout's 'perks'- little bonuses like more starting gold or a greater healing rate that change how a character might play. Last, while a character's statistics are in large part determined by their race, the twenty classes are distinguished by class-specific intrinsic advantages available at certain levels. For example, while a Fighter gets an additional 7% more 'armour value' out of all of his gear at level 6, at the same level, a Barbarian learns a powerful but slow attack, a Paladin learns to cure sickness, and a Beastfighter becomes resistant to poison, and these powers rarely overlap. All these features add to the already considerable replay value of the game.
Finally, ADOM is challenging. While this may not be news to those familiar with Roguelikes, it is a game for which simple completion is a real accomplishment. Most players of ADOM will actually never beat it, because it shows no qualms about throwing monsters at the character well above their ability to handle without clever use of all the resources- intrinsic powers, spells, consumable items, and good tactics- available to them. It is this point that brings the game together. All the above features and mechanics would be fun but ultimately unimportant unless the player actually needed to use them. By threatening the player with the erasure of all their hard-earned progress at every turn, the game creates white-knuckled tension that most turn-based games would find impossible to match, and rewards those who learn from past experiences and integrate their hard-earned knowledge into their play. Anyone who likes dungeon crawlers and would appreciate a game that rewards careful thought and integrating past experience into one's tactics would do well to give ADOM a try.