The Nightmare Cooperative - Review
The Nightmare Cooperative is an interesting and fun little game. Despite being labelled a turn-based rogue like, it's in fact just a proper Roguelike.
Monsters move when you move, they move when you attack, and the levels and traps are randomly generated.
Despite having rather simple mechanics, the game has some rather good depth and difficulty. It's not hard for the sake of being hard; it's hard because of the actions you take and how to try to collect treasure.
A simple patrol monster doesn't seem like much, but one wrong movement three turns ago might just come around to bite you in your behind.
The party based mechanic is interesting as well, all you characters move at the same time, and their abilities are used so as well. So careful planning is needed. You simply cannot just go into this game thinking you can richly rush through a level. The simply act of collecting gold and opening chests increases the game difficulty and changes the area and puzzles.
Some chests are marked with numbers, and this corresponds to the affect they'll have once opened. Open a chest with the number two and two things happen. You can get two monster spawns, or a monster and some acid on the floor.
Dotted randomly on floors are lovely gold crowns, the jewels your party so desperately seek. Although surround by spikes, your only way to get to them is by pressing a button which is also randomly generated on the floor. Even this can change the level as once spikes drop, there is nothing to stop a monster from moving over them.
The music in the game is rather relaxing, adding to the fact that the game is both suitable for casual and hardcore players. I say this because you can easily play a few levels and call it a day, or if you're the completionist type you can easily lose hours accidentally.
The graphics aren't much, but the visual art style is lovely; resembling paper craft models. I find the style very pleasing, and it blends in rather well with the music and effects. It feels as if you're playing a paper crafted board game.
I can easily recommend it to people, and if they want to see what it plays like I have a first impression video for them.
Mac System Requirements
Minimum:
OS: 10.6
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Hard Drive: 200 MB available space
Recommended:
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Hard Drive: 300 MB available space
