I've been playing a bunch more Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl Gold and while I'm not quite ready to talk about it on MoeGamer — I want to try and get to whatever the "endgame" is before I do that — I do want to spend a bit of time enthusing about it here!
My initial assessment of the game as a Diablo clone wasn't quite on the money; while its randomly generated dungeons and loot-grabbing certainly conjures up visions of Blizzard's classic series, there's also a strong amount of Monster Hunter in there, too — or, at least, having never played one, what I understand Monster Hunter to be all about.
This means that a lot of the loot you find is not necessarily equipment with increasingly large numbers in various categories, but instead various bits of crap that can subsequently be cobbled together into all manner of different things — usually armour and "style gear" (equippable items that affect your appearance rather than your stats) — or used to upgrade the "jaras" (weapons, shields and "rechargeable consumables") that you gradually acquire over time.
The interesting thing about Snack World's crafting and upgrading is that it isn't just about making things more powerful. Arguably more important is making the items more flexible; upgrading an item generally unlocks a new colour scheme for it, and colour is one of the several ways you can meet the "daily trends" along with brand and overall style. Wearing an ensemble that meets the daily trend means you're much more likely to find rare item drops, and also defeating an enemy with a weapon that is the same colour as them will also increase the item drop rate.
Weapons also have "banes", which means they're strong against specific types or colours of enemies, and the game mercifully minimises micromanaging this side of things by having both a helpful "auto-equip" option based on the enemies you will encounter in any given quest, and an even more helpful "quick weapon switch" button in combat, automatically giving you the optimal tool for dispatching the foe you're currently locked on to. There's a lot of helpful visual feedback, too; when switching to a particular weapon, any enemies on screen that have a weakness to that weapon will react through a speech bubble ranging from "huh?" (mild weakness) to "OH NO!!!" (extreme vulnerability), allowing you to see at a glance which targets to prioritise.
I'm having a ton of fun so far, and a brief stint in multiplayer the other night was really enjoyable. If anyone else other than my podcasting partner in crime Chris happens to be playing this underappreciated little gem, be sure to let us know and we can crawl some dungeons together sometime!
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