When comparing Nethack vs Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, the Slant community recommends Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source games?” Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is ranked 9th while Nethack is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is:
There are a few different classes available at character creation, each one has it's own abilities that are different from the others. Creating one is quite simple, which makes for a fast way to get into the game and start playing.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Depth
The gameplay is very deep due to the amount of skills and systems present in the game.
Pro Potential for enormous skill growth
Nethack is a game that you can play for hundreds of hours and still not master. But you'll have tons of fun attempting to master it.
Pro Over two decades of constant development
Nethack was first released in 1987. The latest version, 3.6.0, came out in December 2015.
Pro ASCII and tiles available
Nethack is able to run on simple ASCII graphics or use graphic tiles instead.
Pro Simple character creation with different classes
There are a few different classes available at character creation, each one has it's own abilities that are different from the others. Creating one is quite simple, which makes for a fast way to get into the game and start playing.
Pro Gold Standard for roguelikes
The controls and replayability have been refined over the years. Whether the player chooses to play with Tiles (graphics) or console (ASCII) the game works well even when choosing online or offline play. Either way there is just enough interface to play the game.
Cons
Con Burden of knowledge
There's simply too much information that the game expects you to know before you can properly take advantage of the systems in the game.
Con Feature creep
NetHack has an overwhelming amount of features mostly because the development team found them cool at the time, but with little thought of their greater impact. For example, a Nethack staple is Sokoban as a built-in minigame, which feels out of place in a dungeon crawler.
The extremely large amount of items and abilities break the game's balance and coherence.
Con Outdated controls
You need to study a wiki just to learn the most basic controls. The game is broken in this regard.
Con ASCII Art
Con Run of the mill story
The story of the game is pretty generic fantasy fare. It features orcs, elves, and trolls in an effort for the hero to save the world. While it does not detract from the gameplay, it does seem very familiar to those interested in the genre.
Con Have to fiddle with controls
Being that the game uses an emulated keyboard on screen it works best on tablet, though is not really the preferred method (but is the only one) since it takes up screen space.