When comparing Caves of Qud vs Vertical Drop Heroes HD, the Slant community recommends Caves of Qud for most people. In the question“What are the best roguelikes/roguelites on PC?” Caves of Qud is ranked 11th while Vertical Drop Heroes HD is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose Caves of Qud is:
Mutations are one of the biggest parts of Caves of Qud. Want to be a two-headed beguiling spider-thing? A four-armed flying plant-man? You can. There's also lots of armor, weapons, and equipment, which can be found enchanted, as well as a bunch of "spells" (mental mutations) and skills.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Tons of customization
Mutations are one of the biggest parts of Caves of Qud. Want to be a two-headed beguiling spider-thing? A four-armed flying plant-man? You can. There's also lots of armor, weapons, and equipment, which can be found enchanted, as well as a bunch of "spells" (mental mutations) and skills.
Pro Fantastic User Interface
The UI in Qud is very well designed, which helps to make it easy to get into.
Pro Over 60 factions
Befriend or become enemies with dozens of different factions—crabs, turtles, robots and even trees to name a few.
Pro Interesting and original setting
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world that feels truly unique. Caves of Qud's world is like no other, and everything from the creatures/characters you'll encounter, to the items you'll find, and the locations you'll discover is different from what you would find in most rogue-likes.
Pro Unique idea
Unique content and idea of "retro-future" make this "not another rogue-like", in a way.
Pro Unique and evocative prose, art and music
Extremely well written, with highly evocative prose which brings this unique world to life. The fantastic writing is supplemented by a unique art style and sublime otherworldly music.
Pro Huge, procedurally-generated world
Pro Lots of Unlockables
As you play, you randomly find a vendor that sells you a new character skill or passive. Certain combinations of vendor purchases will unlock a new weapon. There are a few weapons that are unlocked by you doing something specific as well.
Pro Difficulty Ramps Up
At first in each run, it is pretty easy, but gets steadily more difficult as you go on. The final boss is a toughie.
Pro There is progression between character deaths
Vendor purchases and leftover gold from a run carry over to your next character. There are three vendors in the starting area that will take your gold to upgrade starting health, weapon damage, and other things that I don't remember off-hand (sorry!).
Pro A lot of possible character builds
As you unlock more skills, passives, and weapons, your pool of possible character builds goes up exponentially. When you start a game, 3 characters are randomly generated for you from that pool. You can reroll your choices for a small cost.
Pro The Good ol' flash days
If you played the original Vertical Drop Heroes you will surely love the remake.
Cons
Con Can be difficult to get started
The beginning of the game explains little, depending on what attributes you put points into in character creation will have a high level of impact at the start of the game. This is not explained to the player, so if you do not put 18 points into "toughness" without having a very particular build in mind that will have some way of dodging or avoiding attacks, the result will just be plenty of death with little advancement.
Con Cooldown simulator
Con UI is in the way
UI is in the way, literally. Even with the overlay mod you'll have issues. The original overlay is too bulky and hard to read.
Con Strange combat
Walking into enemies to attack them just seems strange. You can turn the auto-attack off, but that just seems to make the gameplay even worse.
Con A bit crash-prone
The game can sometimes crash. Seeing as this is a roguelike, crashes can be pretty frustrating.
Con RNG is a nasty mistress
RNG can sometimes give you your favorite character builds, or it can keep giving you your least favorite builds.