By Kevin Kauffmann on September 11, 2013 at 8:59am
It took a couple weeks of convincing by a friend for me to try this game. He swore up and down that I would like it, made me watch him play, tried everything he could to make me ignore my natural dislike of rogue-like games. Eventually I relented, because there was just something about the game that called to me.
That something was enough for me to play the game over and over; I just finished New Game +++ and I still have an itch to go back.
As I mentioned before, Rogue Legacy is part of the rogue-like genre, which is typified by randomized dungeons, simplistic gameplay, permanent death and incredible difficulty. I usually avoid them like the plague, since I don’t tend to enjoy the randomized aspect or the loss of my progress with each death.
Well, Rogue Legacy skirts around the things I dislike. While it is still a randomized dungeon, certain aspects stay the same as you try to kill the four different area bosses. You start in the Castle, the Forest is all the way to the right, the hardest area is always to the bottom, etc. Combine that with a Metroidvania-style exploration scheme and modern platforming elements(dashing, double-jumping, etc) and the game ends up being quite enjoyable.
Speaking on the random aspect, you have the option to effectively lock the dungeon into a consistent map, but at the cost of sacrificing forty percent of the gold you would earn. While it sounds beneficial, I found that it’s really only useful when fighting against bosses, since I might not want to explore all the way through the Forest again and possibly die on the way there.
Rogue Legacy also introduces the concept of becoming one’s descendants after death, which eradicates the last problem I have with rogue-likes. Upon death, the game gives you the option of three descendants and, depending on how the player invests in the tech tree, there are options like becoming a ninja, a paladin, or even a flying lizard. Some classes are clearly better than others, but it’s a breath of fresh air to completely change how you approach exploring the map. Especially when you get the fun genetic modifiers, like ADHD or Stereoscopic Blindness. Most of them don’t affect the game too much, but it’s possible to die very fast if you’re not paying attention to the traits you inherit.
Hell, you can die in a couple rooms even if you are careful, which is especially true in the New Game+ modes. The main reason I’m not playing New Game ++++ is that I’m not sure I can even make it to the first boss. Going up against a Scout, a white floating eye that shoots a fireball that goes through walls, is not difficult at all in the first game. However, by the third playthrough, those Scouts are replaced by Visionaries, the super-powered version which shoots out three streams of fireballs which track the player, and those have been responsible for way too many deaths in my video game family.
By themselves they’re not horrible, but by the third game there are usually two or three in a room, two other enemies which shoot through walls, bruiser type enemies which can kill you in two hits, mages which shoot giant, slow-moving fireballs…
Gah, now I want to go back and play it again.
That is the quality Rogue Legacy possesses; that is why I spent twenty-five hours on it instead of actually working or moving on to the next game. Rogue Legacy continues to pull at me, taunts me with its increasing difficulty and the challenge and the satisfaction that comes with it. I don’t even care about the gold or the equipment that I would gain from exploring the dungeon, I just want to get past that next difficult room.
I mean, gold really doesn’t mean much at this point; now that I’ve maxed out my stats I don’t have anything to spend it on. I will say that it is actually somewhat annoying to get more and more gold from chests, even stats from the different challenge chests, and still not have a full list of equipment with which to customize my character. That is literally the only thing holding me back from having a full achievement list.
Since I can’t just say that Rogue Legacy is a perfect game, let me go ahead and talk about some of the drawbacks. One is that issue with random drops, which means you might grind out exploration over and over again and still not encounter the equipment you want. However, I feel like that is more a problem with rogue-like games in general, so I’ll give Rogue Legacy a pass on that.
I will say that for some more casual players, the difficulty is daunting and would interfere with enjoying the game. There are a couple of runes to find which would lower enemy levels, but it would take more than a few hours of gameplay just to find them, and at that point it may have already turned away the more casual player.
One aspect of the game I go back and forth on is the music. The ambient style of the tracks is creepy and Castlevania-esque, which is perfect, but there just are not that many tracks in the game and, from time to time, that started to wear on me. However, ten seconds later I was frantically trying to survive a room and once the enemies were dead, the familiar sounds not being interrupted by fireball sound effects was very nice to hear.
And that’s it. That’s really the only fault I can find with the game. It feels like the perfect mix of RPG elements, retro flavor and difficulty, combined with modern platforming aspects and tongue-in-cheek humor. Even the story, as sparse as it is and told through journals, feels like a perfect fit.
So, yeah, go get it. Give them money. Cellar Door Games deserves it.
