by AHAHAH No. No, you do not get to use a variant of the original Dark Souls expansion title. Do you know why? It’s not even about a contest of comparative difficulty–it’s simply that you can’t have people “Die More” in your game if it’s so bad that no one wants to play it. That’s right, I’m talking to you…
Teleglitch is a roguelike that in my eyes, just isn’t very good. It’s not surprising–I’ve played a fair number of poor roguelikes already but it’s always sad to come across one. However, Teleglitch falls firmly, flatly, and squarely into a Tier 3 category of garbage, with its only saving graces being a rare few pieces of barely interesting design. It’s difficult to complain about Teleglitch without comparing it to other roguelikes. You move in real-time, you don’t level up, you don’t have stats, you have a map, you choose what level you want to play and there’s a… boring storyline? Now, it’s not entirely fair to judge a new game by asking it to maintain the same aspects of titles from the same genre, but all of these things are certainly different when it comes to most roguelikes and possibly if these were my only “complaints” (and they would be more opinion than valid) I would be more willing to accept these diversions from what one normally considers when they throw around the word “roguelike.” The problem is that these diversions suck and don’t really create anything good.
The biggest part of it for me is… the graphics. Now, I never let the complexity or technical quality of graphics bar my enjoyment of a game. Strictly speaking, Crysis 2 has better quality and complexity in its visuals than Terraria, but Crysis 2 isn’t the game I’ve logged 1300+ hours into. Counter to that though, I do let the effectiveness or efficiency of a game’s graphics affect my enjoyment of it. What I mean by that, is that a game with effective and efficient graphics can use squares, triangles and circles as representations of important game objects and no one will be the wiser. A game without effective and efficient graphics can have all the complexity and detail and busyness it wants but it’s not going to matter–the end-user isn’t going to be able to enjoy any of it. I mean, just look at this:
Seriously, can we even tell what’s going on in this picture? It’s so obvious, isn’t it? I mean, I’m knifing a man-sized spider while 3 of its friend’s corpses lie on the ground nearby along with the corpse of a mad humanoid, all set to the backdrop of a lit lamppost, some broken boards and wood and foliage. That’s pretty clear! /s to the max.
At best, this game is about some light strafing against pixel enemies and if you’re lucky you’ll get to combine a few nails with explosive to make a pipe bomb. At worst, this is a bland, tuneless, soulless game where you’ll run from one messy and obscure room to the next, looking for easily-missed white rectangles indicating that you can interact with something in the environment while scrolling your mouse wheel through your inventory wishing something fun would happen. Or that you had a purpose. Or were playing any other game ever made. The only reason this game avoids T4 is that it’s not offensively bad–I think a real-time gun-based rogeuelike has some merit. Teleglitch, however, is not even close to the realization of that idea.
