When comparing Artemis vs Crawl, the Slant community recommends Crawl for most people. In the question“What are the best PC multiplayer games with asymmetric gameplay?” Crawl is ranked 1st while Artemis is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Crawl is:
Crawl has one lone hero enter a dungeon with objective to find the dungeon boss and strike it down. However, other players wish to take that glory as well, and will use all means possible to take the soul and spot in the story of the hero for themselves. Whoever players the hero, must struggle trough the dungeon, killing monsters and gaining money and experience to get new equipment and grow stronger. All the while other players will take control of monsters and traps to kill the hero. Monsters will make attempts cooperate to get the hero, but to get the soul one must strike the last blow and prepare defend themselves when roles change, one cannot be too cooperative with the temporary allies.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro The focus on social interaction and teamwork creates a highly interactive game
A team of players will have to cooperate in order to play and succeed in this game, making it highly interactive. Each player will need to interact with the rest of their team throughout in order to succeed, making for a very social and party centric game.
Pro Fulfills every fun Hollywood space battle trope you can think of
Artemis is designed around many popular sci-fi tropes, providing an enjoyable sense of fan-service for those who are interested in sci-fi pop culture and movie media.
Pro Creative scripting system where anyone can write a scenario makes for endless gameplay
Users can create their own mission scripts, which they can then share on the developers' forums so that other players can make use of them. This way there is a never ending amount of new gameplay.
Pro A choice of 6 distinctive roles, that allow for a variety of play styles, which keeps the gameplay fresh and interesting
Crew on the bridge consists of a captain and 5 stations.
- Engineering - in charge of energy distribution and the DamCon.
- Science - in charge of scanning and information distribution.
- Weapons - in charge of military equipment.
- Comms - in charge of monitoring communications between enemies and friendly ships.
- Helm - in charge of piloting the ship.
Being that there are a few different roles to choose from it will take many play-throughs to experience them all, which gives good variety to the player, especially when considering that the experience even with the same role can play out differently with a group of different players.
Pro The player vs. player gameplay completely changes up the strategy of the game, making it much more competitive
Version 1.1+ allows for PvP, making Artemis very interactive in a different way from the co-op. This way those that want to be competitive have an outlet of gameplay.
Pro Node Played it
Pro Unique gameplay, blend of cooperation and betrayal
Crawl has one lone hero enter a dungeon with objective to find the dungeon boss and strike it down. However, other players wish to take that glory as well, and will use all means possible to take the soul and spot in the story of the hero for themselves. Whoever players the hero, must struggle trough the dungeon, killing monsters and gaining money and experience to get new equipment and grow stronger. All the while other players will take control of monsters and traps to kill the hero. Monsters will make attempts cooperate to get the hero, but to get the soul one must strike the last blow and prepare defend themselves when roles change, one cannot be too cooperative with the temporary allies.
Pro Local (couch ) 2-4 asymmetric multiplayer
Crawl has built in support for local 2-4 player asymmetric multiplayer with 3 out of the 4 playing co-op against the main player.
Pro Replay value
As the game is played, different monsters are unlocked and dungeons change for each playthrough with different bosses making the game stay interesting as time goes on. Available items change each play-trough as well, players cannot choose same play-style each time as different weapons require different tactics.
Pro Retro graphics
The art style of Crawl is reminiscent of 8bit games of yore and yet are still detailed enough to have very different designs for the different monsters in the game.
Cons
Con Difficult to play online
Artemis is built with LAN play as its focus, making online multiplayer a bit of a pain as the user has to port forward. However you can use a service such as Tungle and connect to the dedicated Artemis network, which makes the process much easier
Con No online multiplayer
Obviously the game is designed around multiplayer play but sadly there is no online multiplayer included.