I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I’ve put 1000 hours into ToME4, mostly on Nightmare/Roguelike difficulty (no respawns, all enemies harder).
My main gripe with the game is that there’s not enough run to run variability in the game. Most Roguelikes give you very sparse equipment drops and consumables you need to carefully ration. ToME4 totally rejects that careful gameplay and just showers you with Diablo-style loot and eliminates consumables entirely, so that there’s no strategic resource planning whatsoever.
The game has some cool music and interesting character classes, but the lack of variety means you can execute the same character build every game if you want (you don’t have to worry about what you find/don’t find). That really defeats the purpose of procedural generation in Roguelikes, and is why I don’t play it anymore.
I played a lot of ToME and I can’t say I actually liked it. The combat seems to bounce between trash mobs you kill without effort to unstoppable death machines, with few signals about which is which. Like I’d be cruising along killing orcs but suddenly I’m half dead. I think it’ll just roll an enemy with a particular set of traits that’s powerful, but I’m not sure.
I don’t like this. In crawl stone soup, my main rogue like, you can tell what’s what by looking at it. It even color codes things by threat level, and highlights in purple if they have unusual equipment.
Also, as you said, the whole shower of loot thing is really tedious.