Tales of Maj'Eyal

 PC
Metascore
tbd

No score yet - based on 2 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 2
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 2
  3. Negative: 0 out of 2
  1. USgamer
    Dec 17, 2013
    100
    Deep, complex and infinitely satisfying, Tales of Maj'Eyal is the pinnacle of the fantasy roguelike as it exists in 2013.
  2. GameGrin
    Jun 16, 2017
    80
    Though I personally don't enjoy roguelikes, ToME is a marvellous game with bundles of class and race options that give the game an astounding amount of replay value. Coupled with the amazingly interesting lore and map design, ToME draws you in time and again.

User Reviews

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User Score
7.1

Mixed or average reviews- based on 68 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 46 out of 68
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 68
  3. Negative: 16 out of 68
  1. apexio
    Sep 21, 2013
    10
    ToME is an amazingly detailed, immersive world to explore. Dungeons aplenty to fight your way through (it's hard!) and tons of great loot.ToME is an amazingly detailed, immersive world to explore. Dungeons aplenty to fight your way through (it's hard!) and tons of great loot. The classes and combat are well balanced which makes for lots of different playable classes that can go all the way to the endgame.

    Replay ability is paramount here. You can have 100 adventures and still be finding new items, monsters, spells, even classes, all the time.

    Every few months I search for actual, quality games to play. 99% of the games I try don't meet my criteria and aren't worth playing. ToME is the 1 in a million that I will play for years and remember my whole life due to the uniqueness of each experience in the game. I rank it up there with the original Zelda from my childhood.    … Full Review »
  2. jayseesee
    Dec 21, 2013
    10
    I've been an avid supporter of roguelikes since longer than I care to admit. Some are hit, some are miss, but the genre always keeps meI've been an avid supporter of roguelikes since longer than I care to admit. Some are hit, some are miss, but the genre always keeps me coming back. I have to say though that ToME definitely hits the nail on the head for that fine balance of enjoyment and difficulty.

    Most rogue-likes that I've played seem to confuse arbitrary difficulty for actual difficulty. Having to memorize what critters have what attacks, and knowing exactly which corpse to eat to get past level 25 is not fun, nor is it difficult (other than finding the information). ToME is surprisingly fair for a rogue-like, if you die, 95% of the time, it was your fault, and you can figure out exactly what you did wrong, or where you went wrong. The difficulty is in the tactics.

    Blending the line between rogue-likes and other games, the traditional game-mode is Adventure, which gives you a certain amount of lives as you level up. This is a wonderful feature, as you can recover and learn from past encounters, and give them a try to tackle again. The game seems to be balanced around this mode, but you CAN give Rogue-like a try, which is one life and one life alone. There's even achievements for each style of play!

    Speaking of achievements, there is a plethora of achievements for each game mode and certain hidden actions, both character and lifetime specific. This gives you goals to work for, if you are that style of player, and will keep even the most fervid of achievement-hunters active for a VERY long time. Some achievements can even unlock new classes, races, and skill lines for you to try!

    As far as class and race selection, there is very nice spread of classes that all have their own flavor, feel and play style. Even among single classes, there's different ways you can play them. A fire based Archmage will play VERY differently from an Arcane, Ice, Lightning or even multi-element specialist. The unlocking process also keeps your choices lower at the beginning, which makes for a more relaxed set of choices, and lets you hunt down when you want to introduce more complexity into your game.

    The modding scene for this game is very robust and quite a few members of the community have introduced some GREAT mods that really add to the enjoyment and replayability of the game, not that it suffers any even on its own. Some of those mods have even gone on to be incorporated into the base game on their own.

    All in all it's a wonderful game that I keep getting sucked back into! Definitely worth a try for any fans of the genre.    … Full Review »
  3. Euphoria58
    Dec 23, 2013
    10
    TL;DR Tales of Maj'Eyal (or TOME) is a very well-built and versatile game that appeals to many turnbased RPG/strategy audiences, not just yourTL;DR Tales of Maj'Eyal (or TOME) is a very well-built and versatile game that appeals to many turnbased RPG/strategy audiences, not just your standard roguelike junkies (like me). Try it out.

    I definitely recommend giving TOME a shot, especially considering it's free off of their main site at http://te4.org/ although the 'free' copy doesn't net you the Stone Warden class, cosmetic features (such as a wider range of character sprites and even beards on dwarven females), and Exploration mode for those who don't like the idea of losing their character to a limited life count.

    For people not familiar with roguelikes, the genre is capitalized by a few strong features: Permadeath, turnbased combat, randomly generated content, and dungeon crawling. Some games, such as FTL, Rogue Legacy, or Binding of Isaac, are often called roguelites, because they feature some roguelike elements while bringing in flavors from other genres.

    TOME is definitely a pure roguelike, although it has different things to accommodate those who aren't diehard fans fo the genre, but to start I want to get into the features that roguelike players will appreciate.

    First, the game features an auto-explore button (default key is Z) that will literally run around the entire dungeon for you, exploring any crevice you haven't discovered yourself, and stopping the turn after a monster is found or when you are injured. Although it comes with the immediate disadvantage of losing a turn to a monster attack, this allows you to get past the 'easy' parts of the game relatively quickly after you know how to deal with them.

    This amazing feature is bundled with another, to ensure you're reaching your skill level of play as soon as possible: Dungeons that are too easy for you automatically teleport you to the final room, where you can skip several floors of almost worthless loot and monsters that grant barely any EXP, so you can get straight to the climactic fight with the dungeon's final boss.

    The game also features a cloud storage system for your save files off of an online account that syncs save files across every computer you have. This does not, however, make the game online-only, but instead means that when you access the internet you can play the same save file across multiple computers without having to manually transfer the file.

    The few classes you start with offer a lot of choice to the game:
    The Berserker dishes out massive damage with equally massive weapons.
    The Bulwark plays defensively, using a sword-and-board fighting style to tank and dish out damage.
    The Archer uses bows or slings and excels at taking foes out either at range or with deadly traps.
    The Arcane Blade, my personal favorite, combines his choice of melee combat style with arcane forces, allowing him to dish out devastating physical attacks and powerful elemental abilities on the same turn.
    The Rogue uses his stealth and traps to take out foes while remaining entirely unnoticed. Just remember to take off your light sources, as they'll give away your position quickly.
    The Shadowblade functions the same way the Rogue does, but uses the arcane arts as a utility to assassinate his targets.
    Finally, the Alchemist and his trusty golem sidekick are your starting magical powerhouse, using arcane magic to rain down destruction on their foes.
    The classes I've listed are only about a quarter of what you can play ingame, but most of them are locked. Each class provides a unique way of playing the game, each with his own special powers and abilities. There are also unlockable races as well. I'd tell you more, but the 5k character limit won't allow me to do so, and I don't want to spoil the game to everyone reading this.

    For beginners to roguelikes or more casual gamers, the Adventure game mode gives you multiple lives instead of your standard 1* present in most roguelikes, and the Exploration game mode allows you to play the game from start to end without fear of a permanent death. TOME also comes with something an unfortunately large number of roguelikes lack: a tutorial. The tutorial is actually pretty comprehensive compared to other roguelikes that take a half-hearted shot at teaching you how to play, meaning you aren't going into the game entirely clueless.    … Full Review »
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