When comparing WazHack vs Nethack, the Slant community recommends Nethack for most people. In the question“What are the best roguelikes/roguelites on PC?” Nethack is ranked 16th while WazHack is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Nethack is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Offers an impressive amount of variety in items and monsters, which keeps the experience fresh
Over 300 items and 130 monsters, WazHack offers a lot of variety that will take a lot of play throughs to experience.
Pro Unique twist on roguelike gameplay where the game takes a side-scrolling approach
A 3D rendered side-scrolling roguelike, makes for some very unique mechanics, thanks to not being top down like many traditional roguelikes. While it will still have the player progress in randomly generated dungeons, exploring for new items and gear, the battle mechanics will be more akin to side scrolling platforming.
Pro Surprising depth
Many approaches and strategies are viable in a simple shell.
Pro Controller support
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 Depth
The gameplay is very deep due to the amount of skills and systems present in the game.
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.
Cons
Con Some quirks with control scheme and interface
Some specific action in the game are hard to pull off with touch screen, causing the player to move when trying to open menus.
Con Costs money to get the full experience
The game asks to spend money on each character type separately to go deeper than 300 feet; cost about $1 each.
Con Somewhat crude art-style
Graphics are reminiscent of freeware games from the early 2000's.
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.