Review: The Nightmare Cooperative

The Nightmare Cooperative is a fiendishly difficult turnbased roguelike featuring an array of characters, each with different powers to help you destroy monsters, escape levels, and collect gold.

Pros:

• Awesome “Artsy fartsy” graphics that are charming to look at and are so charming to look at.
• game play is a rogue like dungeon crawler with puzzle elements mixed in.
• Easy controls, use the arrow keys or WASD for movement and space bar for executing special moves.
• Tutorial section.
• Options available before game launch, here you can adjust graphic settings, resolution and fullscreen yes/no.
• Keys can re confugered.
• Online leaderboards with friend/world and local filters.
• Many different characters to find and use. Each character is unique and offers different abilties. Archers,mages,swordsman are just a few examples.
• You can find new characters and indeed have them join your poarty by finding them in game and nudging them.
• Levels are randomised so you never play the same game twice.
• You can pick up rare artifacts and new weapons.
• Has a huge addictive “Just one more go|” appeal. Its a game that is hard to put down.
• Loads of enemy types and just like the playable characters, have unique attack patterns.
• You have four worlds to traverse, From caves to ice caves each area has its own atmosphere.
• Chests are good and bad, good as you get loot but bad as they spawn enemies within the level.
• Great musical score.
• Upon death and it will happen, you get a stat screen that breaks everything down for you. It will show on a bar how far in the caves you went, gold picked up and how many moves you took. moves are classed as every step you take.
• Combat is auto and is triggered by touching an enemy, They will fight back and you will lose hearts.
• Enemies move when you move as do other members of your party. Its this control scheme that puts the game in its own unique style. The more players you have in  a party, the harder simple navigation becomes.
• Get to the stairs to advance to the next level.
• Hover the mouse pointer over anything in the cave/dungeon to get a detailed description.
• To do special moves, You need to collect potions and each shot takes one potion. Each special move is unique and for that reason using them is unique. Archers for example need a space of one square to fire an arrow.

Cons:

• Real hard work to get a pad to work despite the options showing in the options pre game loading.
• No Steam achievements as of yet.
• Gameplay is tough and needs a few dry runs to get used to the gameplay.

In Summary, The game is a little gem, The core gameplay is simple, Collect loot kill enemies and survive. The control scheme used makes it a lot harder and brings a more puzzle element to it all. Moving a simple step forward for one character may look straight forward and easy but that same action could put another of your members in trouble. I like how accessible the game is and how much fun you can have with it. A discoveries section in the menu is a lite version of a bestiary showing off what you have found/party members rescued. Hopefully we will get some more levels and maybe even a level creator, Just to give it a bit more length. As is this is a really nice little roguelike with a great control scheme. Worth a look for sure.