Sword of the Stars: The Pit Review
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As the roguelike genre has seen quite a bit of activity in recent years, The Pit goes to some lengths to distinguish itself with its sci-fi theme, inclusion of ranged combat, and lighthearted tone. While not a perfect game by any means, it certainly features the brutally difficult, "one more try" gameplay roguelikes are known for, but makes things accessible enough so that you don't need to be experienced with the genre to enjoy it.
Minimalist Story & Premise
The Pit, like most roguelikes, has a dead-simple story. A deadly plague has caused chaos and death across your world, and the last hope for a cure lies in a forgotten alien facility deep within the Feldspar Mountains. As a lone marine, scout or engineer, it's your job to quest down into the depths and find the salvation of your people. Naturally, this means trekking through 30-odd floors of the randomly generated maze-like facility, starting out in the caverns above it and progressing down through quarters, medical bays, research labs, weapons development departments, and more, with things becoming increasingly dangerous the deeper you go.
Aside from the intro movie, the most storytelling you'll ever get is in the form of computer terminal messages you can decipher - some of them providing in-game benefits along with backstory. The Pit makes no apologies for its simplistic theme, but given the focus is squarely on the game mechanics, that's not such a bad thing. Admittedly, I haven't played any other Sword of the Stars games, so some of the references went over my head, but I suspect there are plenty of little in-jokes here and there that fans of the series will notice and appreciate.
Character System & Gameplay
The Pit gives you three character classes: Marine, Scout and Engineer, which roughly equate to fighter, rogue and mage archetypes were this a fantasy title. Each class starts out with different attribute and skill distributions, and they also have unique starting equipment. Ergo, the Marine is brawnier than the others, but also dumber, has combat-focused skills, and starts out with an assault rifle and several grenades; the Engineer is the polar opposite, carrying minimal weaponry to start, but making up for it with more computer hacking tools, repair devices, and a skill distribution favoring brains and working with technology; the Scout sits somewhere in between and could be described as a sharpshooter with survival training.
The Pit doesn't have the most extensive list of attributes and skills compared to some other games in its genre, but it has more than enough to get the job done. The three core attributes are Might, Brains and Finesse - Might affects your hit points, food consumption, resistance to poison, inventory carrying capacity, etc.; Brains affects most non-combat skills, makes you more resistant to mental status effects such as confusion, etc.; and Finesse deals with coordination-based skills (weapon accuracy, trap detection and disarming) as well as countering status effects like blindness. When you level up, you're able to distribute points to increase these, but you won't get so many points that you'll be able to make up for your character's weaknesses entirely, and you may stunt your growth if you try to do so.
Skills, meanwhile, cover everything from using various types of weapons, to utility stuff. Unlike attributes, skills are not quite as well balanced or universally useful. For instance, there is a lot of overlap and confusion in how weapons are handled - there is a melee skill which only affects hand-to-hand combat, a knives skill which does not extend to blades, rifles don't cover assault rifles, and so on. Meanwhile, some non-combat skills are almost required to proceed effectively (lockpick), while others have very few uses outside of specific situations (installing biomods). Non-combat skills also have the same redundancy issue - most of the non-combat skills do very similar things, like opening different types of containers. I would have liked to see a few more unique options available, such as hacking computers to open doors, disable traps and reprogram security systems.
The Pit also features an extensive crafting system, but it's not something I found myself engaging with extensively. Not only is there a chance of breaking a lab bench or cooking station every time you use it, but if you try to use an invalid recipe, you will always lose all ingredients. Many crafting recipes are counter-intuitive, and ones you'd expect to work don't. For instance, the tutorial teaches you that combining bread and meat will make a "sotswich", but if you try to combine bread and cheese, the process of creating that sandwich will apparently be so catastrophic as to destroy both the bread and the cheese. Similarly, combining one variety of meat with another item will work, but a second variety of meat won't work. Because recipes are fixed and not randomized upon every game restart, the 100% item loss for crafting failures seems less like a fair game mechanic and more a contrived way to encourage additional replays - I would have preferred a 50% item loss chance for failed crafting, or at least a chance determined by your skill set.
Combat in The Pit is probably its most unique element. Like most modern roguelikes, it plays out in a top-down turn-based format, running in real-time with no enemies around but slowing down when they draw near. The vast majority of roguelikes are fantasy-themed, and as such often don't give ranged combat its fair due, but The Pit is far more geared towards it. For example, it features a novel aiming mechanic that allows certain full-auto weapons to target multiple enemies within a single turn, effectively dividing your damage between them. You can expect to have to choose your weapons very carefully for each situation - hoard your best stuff for later and you can easily find yourself pushing up daisies. Tactical positioning also matters, and knowing when to fire, reload or retreat will often determine whether you survive a battle. Sometimes combat can get a bit "cheesy" because of the reliance on kiting enemies to avoid getting swarmed, but that's not a problem exclusive to The Pit compared to other games in its genre.
If I had one complaint to make about combat, it's that there's just a bit too much of it. Every class in the game is basically forced to invest heavily into weaponry into order to survive, due to the high number of enemies. This makes playing the Marine class a cakewalk in the beginning; Engineers, by contrast, will struggle early on, but find themselves rolling in resources later if they can make it through. Scouts are an interesting choice thanks to their large number of grenades and long-range rifle skills, but I never felt like I had a significant advantage over other classes while playing as her. It would have been nice to see a stealth skill to avoid enemies altogether, and other alternatives like reprogramming security bots. I do like that enemies are suitably dangerous and resources limited enough that you really have to think about how to proceed, but there is definitely a missed opportunity here for more creative ways to deal with monsters.
Last, The Pit features an interesting color-coding approach to its random elements. Items like biomods (upgrades for your gear) are colored, not named, and the effects of each color are randomized each time you start the game. This means that you'll want to make notes on which upgrades might be beneficial and which might be harmful, and unlike the crafting system you won't be able to look up an FAQ to save yourself time experimenting - or cheating, if that's your perspective. Traps follow the same formula, with different colors indicating different effects, some beneficial (yes, traps can heal you) and some extremely unfortunate (30 turns of blindness or poison).
Presentation
Roguelikes are just as well known for their tough gameplay as they are for their minimalist presentation, but The Pit earns some points for making things more accessible. It has a clean and functional art style with an old 16-bit look to it, and while the big-headed cartoonish characters are not going to be to anyone's tastes, the monster designs are a bit more inspired, and include several types of robots, blobs of acid, aliens, and one particular enemy that conceals itself as a helpful object, only to attack you when you get close - a sci-fi take on the classic mimic enemy. The visuals get the job done quite well and I have few complaints about them, but unfortunately performance can be a bit poor at times, usually when you're in an area with lots of enemies - a game engine issue, not my PC's hardware. Refreshingly, The Pit was rock-solid stable for me, and I experienced no crashes or bugs while playing, not bad for the v1.0.0.0 release.
The soundtrack and sound effects in The Pit aren't bad either. The menu interface is full of stock-standard computer-y bips and boops, and each weapon and monster type has unique sound effects which help them stand apart. There is even a little bit of voice acting here and there for your player character, though it's not what I'd call professional work. The music, meanwhile, is a mix of electronic ambiance and more upbeat techno-inspired songs that remind me of games you might find on the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis; they're both atmospheric and catchy, and I certainly didn't find myself rushing to mute the game in favor of my own music.
The Pit does have a few small weaknesses here and there. The control setup is one of them. The basic controls are fairly intuitive - by default it uses the WASD keys for movement, R for reloading, F for attacking, Z for zooming the camera in and out, X for resting, spacebar for interacting, etc. Where it stumbles is in the aiming system. Instead of using the mouse to select targets, you have to use the arrow keys to move your reticle instead. This can take a little getting used to. What's more, if you are using a multi-target weapon, you have to hold the Ctrl key to select each individual target, and if you let go before finishing selecting all three targets then you'll need to aim again. As many menus in the game work best with the mouse anyway, it's puzzling why arrow keys are used instead. Mouse control has been hinted at for an expansion by the developers, but I'm not in favor of withholding basic usability features like that.
There are also a few gaps in the finish and polish here and there - for example, there are no tooltip descriptions of skills and attributes, and there are some blind spots in the game's tutorial as well, so you'll need to (gasp!) read the manual to fully come to grips with the mechanics. Annoyingly, when you are carrying a hacking tool, lockpick, etc., the game will default to using it every time you go to interact with an object. I would have much preferred it default to not using those items, as they tend to be limited and it can be irritating to have to tell the game to not use up a lockpick if you don't need or want to use it, every single time you interact with a locked door (Editor's Note: this issue has been fixed in the latest patch).
Conclusion
Overall, Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a quality roguelike which provides a pretty full-featured character system, a good roster of enemies to fight, lots of equipment and items to use, a fairly extensive (if contrived) crafting system, and, perhaps most importantly for it, attractive presentation and accessible gameplay. While I do think there is room for improvement, and it's not as feature-rich as other roguelikes, it's hard to complain too much at what you get out of the game, and it's bound to be improved in the future with patches and expansion packs. At an asking price of $10, I can recommend Sword of the Stars: The Pit to most roguelike fans, as well as RPG fans who are interested a painless gateway into the genre; while it's not the best, most feature-rich roguelike on the market, its futuristic theme and unique elements elevate it to make it well worth considering.
