Review by RPGCreations.

Meritous is an action-RPG dungeon crawl.

Pros: The map graphics and user interface are impressive, I liked the colors. The attacking system is easy and simple -- there's no real aiming -- and it works. The upgrading system is fun. The dungeon is massive; I played for about an hour and only explored about 100 of the 3000 (!) rooms. The gameplay almost feels like a danmaku game at times: you are avoiding bullets a lot of the time, because you can fire so infrequently. The story seemed well-thought out and the instruction manual is very extensive, with a lot of detail about the background of the game.

Cons: It uses ripped music; I like the selection, but it's not original. The sound effect for the attack shouldn't vary so much in volume, sometimes it's way too loud. The game seemed to have no full screen mode: I run in 1600x1200 resolution so the screen was very small for me. The sprites are too simple, the pixel art techniques used aren't very good; the main character's sprite seems to float and has seemingly no firing animation. The game would benefit from a mini-map visible during play rather than as a separate screen. I wish there were a way to "pull" crystals to you like in the Megaman Legends games, walking over them to collect them gets *very* tiresome. I wish there were more character classes to play as, with different skills. The enemies should have had a greater variety of firing patterns, it'd make it more interesting, although admittedly I didn't get far enough to see all the enemies.

Overall: It's a fun action-based dungeon crawl but with rough edges; if you liked Diablo and are addicted to exploring huge dungeons you'd probably have some fun.

Name: Meritous
Developer: Lancer-X
Category: RPG
Type: Freeware
Size: 2MB