/vr/ - Retro Games

Ever played a game that felt too hard and too easy at the same time?

Pic related, talking about Deathkings of the Dark Citadel. I just played it again and it's a lot more frustrating than I remembered. The puzzles are more straightforward than the base game but they really went all out with the enemies. Basically every level has tons of Slaughtaurs and Afrits combined with unfriendly architecture. If there's some small pool of water you can bet there are going to be at least three Stalkers in there. It gets to the point where there's hardly a reason to ever stop firing the wand in water, because your path gets blocked by a stalker every other step and the other weapons are too slow and cost mana.

All that wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the "respawns". In the base game basically only Ettins respawn which every class can easily kill without using mana. But in Deathkings every level has dangerous enemies like Slaughtaurs spawning at the usual interval, every four minutes. Of course ammo and health don't respawn so you're essentially looking at a time limit, you can't fuck around for too long or you'll eventually waste too much mana and health on killing the respawns. It also makes looking around in the levels really annoying because there's always going to be some asshole shooting at fireballs at you while you look at the map. The mage has it easier with this than the other two because the wand is the best first weapon, you could basically play the whole game with it because it does decent damage, has very fast projectile speed, pierces, doesn't get reflected, and doesn't cost mana. On the other hand the other three weapons the mage has feel less than potent.

Even with all this shit my inventory was loaded with items. 25 quartz flasks, 6 icons, like 8 maulotaurs, etc. at the moment I killed the last bosses. Still it felt like the game was pissing me off, throwing annoying enemies everywhere constantly and making me feel like I'm wasting my ammo and health.