You sure you are talking about Ziggurat? Ziggurat doesn't have bots, it plays like rogulike Painkiller.

At least I am confused now. While I have the game on GOG (never played it yet), for some reason I thought it is some old indie 2D platform jumping (puzzle?) game. Maybe I am mixing it up with some other game with a similar oddball name...

Nope, only puzzles it has, is how to survive the room and find hidden rooms.

i think you're right

No wait, it is Ziggurat.

It's basically one arena after another, a series of death matches (for lack of a better term).

Problem is that deathmatch and bots imply that AI enemies behave like human players and fight in the same way. That's not a thing in Ziggurat/Painkiller/Doom 2016/Serious Sam.

For one, I can actually play bot matches unlike above mentioned titles.

FWIW, I didn't enjoy Ziggurat either.

Maybe I just wasn't good enough, but the sense of either (my) skill improvement or accrued character development was very minimal. But I managed to quite enjoy and beat Rogue Legacy despite similar general design issues.

I think my best run (10-12 rooms) was like my 3rd run, and it was mostly downhill from there due to skill and RNG both.

I think for me the issue is what tinyE gets at - each room is a world unto itself. You're locked in, and if you either get a bad roll of the dice, or make a mistake early, there's no retreating/regrouping. As such, there's really not much "strategy" to it - or rather, you need some pretty strong quick twitch skills to start out with an advantage and then you can methodically work through it.

If you're not so good at quick twitch, esp. because the aiming is (no pun intended) really hit or miss, you're going to find yourself boxed in early and often.

They technically aren't bots, sure, but I see his point. Many rooms just felt like a zerg swarm where I was kiting like nuts hoping I killed them before I ran out of room or backed into mobs coming up behind. Strategy/tactics, really not much.