Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I've played about 400 hours of Hitman 1-3, so I felt right at home in this game. It's very well polished and pretty well balanced. For the chosen scope, I really have no complaints, and I'm always glad to play a small-but-finished 7DRL instead of a large-but-unfinished one. The opening help screen is really top notch. The sprites are from a free tile set, and fit the game well. My high score was around 500,000 and I saw about 4 NPC types: target, staff, weak guard, and tough guard. I apologize if I missed any content. Taking off my "holy crap, you finished a 7DRL" hat for a moment, I do wish the NPCs had more interesting behavior. One staple of the Hitman franchise is learning your target's path and finding the right moment to strike. This game has none of that; enemies stay in place, and you need to lure them toward you. It makes for a pretty limited set of tactics. A few sfxr sounds would have gone a long way toward making the game easier to understand. It felt overly punishing to not have health restored before each level. Wouldn't Agent 47 get a chance to rest up between assassinations? Other than those quibbles, I was delighted to play this game and I would love to try future revisions of it if there are any.
• Very cool idea. I am a fan of translating mechanics from other games into roguelikes, to bring a new experience to the genre. I am also a fan of stealth roguelikes. The graphics and colors here are nice and clear, and I appreciate the instructions page. It did take me quite a while to comprehend how the distraction mechanism worked. I think that it would have been nice to see just one more mechanic in the game, maybe moving bodies or throwing coins, along with either rooms with multiple people in them or people that walked around. As it was, separating guards was fairly trivial by using the distraction. After I understood the mechanics, the only reason I took damage was if multiple guards heard me through doors, and all came in at once. There is a lot of potential here for a very interesting and unique game if it is expanded.
• Completeness 4 Completely bug free, didn't run into any problems. There's a good amount of polish with the indicators, and the information presented for the enemies. Aesthetics 3 Art style was consistent and nice on the eyes. At times it was a little difficult to tell exactly the capabilities of each guard though, it did make sense eventually that the dudes with berets couldn't be tricked by anything, but it wasn't completely obvious at the start. It would have been really nice to have a little more expanded controls. Keypad + mouse is not very comfortable, and neither are wasd controls. Having the game playable entirely on keyboard or entirely on mouse would have been much nicer Fun 3 Scouting the area, determining the best assault path, and finally taking down the target, was an interesting gameplay loop. Sometimes it could get a little repetitive though, most of the time it seemed to turn into build up uniform levels until you're authorized enough to sneak past the guards. Innovative 3 This is the first roguelike I've played with a disguise mechanic, and in general the premise of playing a stealthy assassin is quite original. Scope 2 It would have been nice to see some patrol paths, and a couple more varied ways to take down targets. The Hitman series is well known for it's myriad different approaches you can take towards your goal, so seeing some of that translated over into roguelike form would have been awesome. Roguelike 3 Turn based combat, perma death, most things I'd expect from a roguelike are there. I would have wanted a couple more common roguelike features, for instance resource management and character progression to give it a 4.