Rogue Legacy 2
Released: April 28, 2022
Game Length: 38 Hours
Grade: A-
Old Game Sequel
The Legacy: Before we dive into the sequel, we must first take a look at its origins. You might not realize this, but the original Rogue Legacy came out in June 27, 2013. I personally played and reviewed it back of May 10th, 2017. Right before the sequel came out, Epic Games Store released it for free during the week of April 7th, 2022. Cellar Door Games made this goofy little rogue-like where you play a particular character with some wacky traits that may or may not help you as you progress through the castle. Depending on your skill level, you could have completed the game in a matter of 30 minutes with 5 runs or spend several hours building up your primary stats as you sacrifice dozens of guys to get farther through the castle. There wasn't much to speak of in the terms of graphics or gameplay. The entire point of the game was to have fun trying out the flawed personality traits of your next victim. Eventually, I had to give-up on the game since the amount of progress I was making was insignificant to the amount of time I dedicated into each run.
More of Everything
Setting: The one thing that is made very clear from the get-go is how polished the game's graphics are when venturing through all the corridors. Each enemy is well-designed. Some of the obstacles are 3D images cleverly disguised as 2D art. The bosses aren't simply small enemies resized to blurry proportions. Once you defeat a boss, you won't have to defeat him again (at least not outside of challenges). Every level is crafted specifically with a new environment, an evolving story, and varying mechanics. Although the option to skip to the beginning of each level becomes available early on, it is entirely possible to reach level 4 by going higher or level 6 by going lower in the first castle section. The amount of objects and damage the enemies toss at you become increasingly difficult, while the amount of gold rewarded increases as well.
Classes: Although you will be offered a simple knight to start out with, the game does a beautiful job balancing out all the different classes. If you take the time to peruse the conversations online, you'll find people actively debating which class they feel is the best. There are 15 Classes to unlock. All of their stats will vary: health, mana, weapon, critical damage, how critical damage is applied, talent, and mastery. There is a chance you can obtain a few of these juggled between the classes or the option to switch some out while exploring the dungeons. After you complete some challenges, you are also offered a chance to always have the option of a specific class, talent, or spell. Currency obtained by completing the challenges will also allow you to transform their primary weapon into a more interesting one. Things can get quite humorous if say you get a singing bard that farts every time he jumps.
Attributes: Although the heart of the first game is still present, it appears that there is less emphasis on generating wild and crazy builds. You no longer can go through tiny mouse holes if you obtain dwarfism. Choosing traits that adjust your screen like Nostalgic or Colorblind will simply increase your gold output in exchange of making things a little more difficult. There are some more game-breaking traits that will keep you from eating food, dying in a single hit, prevent you from doing any damage to enemies, or add cooldowns to your strikes. Relics, for the most part, adds some sort of power. Some may allow you to do damage while others will contain a condition when used or obtained. On top of all this, there are heirlooms that allow you to access levels, runes that give a slight boost to your performance, and about a dozen spells to choose from.
The Grind
Power Creep: It is entirely possible to advance through the first four levels without ever defeating any of the bosses. Unfortunately, it will take all your effort to get to a tolerable level to defeat them. The first problem is you have to buy everything. Unlocking a class might take everything you earned in a single run. The second problem: there is inflation. This means that you have to make a choice whether you want more health, armor, runes, relics, classes, more gold earned, more gold saved, or more items earned. The more you spend, the higher the cost gets for those things. After 25 hours, there wasn't a single point that cost less than 3,000 gold. This wasn't good when a decent full run provided me no more than 40,000. Did I mention that most of these points only added like 1 damage, prevented 1 point of damage, or gave you a third of what was required for any item. To make matters worse, there is a hard cap of 35% damage prevented. This means that the game favors vitality builds when stacking armor isn't an option.
Equipment: The other thing that needs to be mentioned is unlocking your armor and runes. When you are exploring the dungeons, occasionally you will come across some equipment or rune blueprint. You will need to buy the opportunity to use these with gold, ore, and aether. Each level will provide you with another piece of the set that incrementally builds your stats. But wait, there's more! You have to buy weight increase & rune increase to use any new ones you find. By the time I got to the fourth level, I realized that all my gold from a single run was being used to equip a single item. Fortunately, the relics that are obtained randomly in the dungeons do not hold any sort of requirement to unlock.
The Fifth Level: The first four levels are designed in a way you can teleport around, obtain bonuses, and skip ahead if you so desire. All that disappears once you reach the Sun Tower. See, the sixth level will limit your visibility to a tiny portion of the screen until you beat the boss at the end of the fifth level. That boss can only be reached after you venture through every room of the level to the very top. There is no shortcut. You can choose to keep the teleporting platform to the boss room active by locking down all the rooms in exchange for losing a portion of your gold. However, the boss can be extremely difficult when each hit deals 100 damage and - as I mentioned above - your character can only prevent 35 of that damage. I had to physically cheese my way through by increasing that limit, building up my health, and locking down the boxer class. Even then, I somehow survived with a mere 20 health left. I proceeded through the sixth level, but decided to throw in the towel after being defeated by that boss. I did not want to grind out any more points.
Summary
Review: Rogue Legacy 2 does a fantastic job making a grander transition from its predecessor. The setting, enemies, graphics, classes, bosses, and challenges are all awesome. The opportunity to make progress into the various levels is a great addition to the series. However, those who are having trouble surviving are not going to be pleased by what they will need to do to make progress. Spending run-after-run to increase your damage a few points at a time, prevent damage a few points at a time, or provide you with some flexibility for your builds is not very enjoyable. Although there are perhaps other games that perform the rogue-like approach better like Dead Cells or Hades, this game still has a unique feel that's worth trying out.
5-26-2022