It is
roughly a year since the IRLDb has been updated last time. I think it is a good time to summarize the results of IRLDb's community features.
Here is the list of roguelikes sorted by average rating.
After removing games with 1-2 votes, we have a clear winner:
Spelunky, with 8 votes, average of 4.625. I think most of us don't agree that it is fully a roguelike. But I think that it is even more impressive that a platformer ranked so high on a forum for people who like games where you can think for as long as you want, and quick reflexes are irrelevant. Congratulations! I think it would be great to feature Spelunky on the Roguelike Radio, or have Derek Yu talk about his adventures with Spelunky, DoomRL and other roguelikes. Or maybe we should wait for the upcoming new version of Spelunky for XBLA.
We have also 8 games with only one "5" vote (
Diggr, Elona, JauntTrooper, DrashRL, Mutant Aliens, Tiny Angband, UnNetHack, UnAngband), and 6 games with one "5" and one "4" vote (
Chess Rogue, Expedition, Hydra Slayer, Incursion, NPPAngband, Prospector). On one hand single votes don't mean much. On the other hand, they do mean that someone has played this game and really liked it ("5" is
defined as "everyone should play it!"). In our roguelike community, we pride ourselves for playing games which are good but not very popular (due to lack of advertisements), but there could be still even less popular games which are even better. I recommend everyone to try these games, and place their votes, either to confirm the quality or to show that they are overrated.
Then, we have
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. After removing all games with one or two votes, and Spelunky (which is less roguelike), this classic (but constantly updated) game wins both in terms of quality (4.44) and popularity (16 votes). Congratulations!
A bit surprisingly (for me), the next place goes to
Rogue itself (5 votes, 4.2 average). I think it confirms what has been mentioned many times in the Roguelike Radio: Rogue was a game where everything was invented from scratch, and everything fits together really well. Other games just imitate Rogue, and some features are there just for a tradition, and no longer fit so well.
The next place goes to
ADOM (4.18 average, 11 votes). Hopefully ADOM II will be even better!
Then we have the highest rated new roguelike:
T.o.M.E. with 12 votes and 4.08 average. Despite having many fans, and winning
Roguelike of the Year for two years in the row, it still loses to classics such as DCSS and ADOM.
Two games with 5 votes averaging 4:
Brogue and
Smart Kobold. Again, I find it surprising that Brogue is ranked lower than Rogue (and since it seems quite popular, I would expect more votes for it).
Smart Kobold is the highest rated 7DRL. Congratulations!
We have also the old
Castle of the Winds with 4 votes averaging 4, and 22 games with one or two votes averaging 4. I won't list all of them.
POWDER gets 7 votes (average 3.86), and
IVAN gets 6 votes (average of 3.83) (I am surprised that it seems relatively so popular). I am very surprised at the low average score of
Dwarf Fortress (10 votes, average 3.8 ) and
DoomRL (8 votes, average 3.75). We also have a mainstream commercial game in this region,
Diablo, with 6 votes and average 3.67.
Both
Angband and
Nethack have 11 votes with average 3.09. Probably most people who know what roguelikes are, but do not know much about the genre, think about one of these two. But in fact, their ranking is much lower than both newer games such as TOME and Brogue, and other old classics such as Rogue and ADOM. Let's tell people not satisfied with Angband and Nethack that there are other great roguelikes! I am especially surprised how popular they are on Android (
Angband has 10000+ downloads and rating 4.0, and
NetHack has 50000+ downloads and rating 4.1; and their interface was not obviously designed for mobile devices... well,
Legends of Yore is designed for mobile devices and has 50000+ downloads and rating 4.6, so it is better).
Yet another surprising thing is the position of
Dungeons of Dredmor. A runner-up for Roguelike of the Year 2011 gets only two votes averaging 2.0. Come on, I think it should have some fans on RogueTemple...
So, now
go vote for roguelikes that you think are overrated, underrated, or rightly rated but you just want to confirm it. Your votes are linked to your Roguetemple forum account, so if you are registered on the forum, you can rate roguelikes right away. The most popular game (DCSS) has 16 votes, it is still much less than the number of registered members after the purge (849). I hope some of the content of this post will be outdated soon.
If a game is missing from IRLDb, just add it to RogueBasin, and it should appear in IRLDb tomorrow.
Also don't forget to mark the games you have won in the XP column.
Lord Blade seems to be the best roguelike player, with 10 special victories in different roguelikes (@@@@@) and 3 more normal victories (@@@@). Congratulations!
There is also a
feedback feature which allows to provide detailed reviews, feedback and whatever, but it does not seem to be very popular.
