Enjoyment - 6/10
Difficulty - 6/10

Rogue Legacy 2 wants to be loved, but during your committed relationship they become clingy and overbearing.

On top of this, the trophy list asks you to become the game's servant and makes you wish that your contract had an earlier end date.
🏆

Overall really loved it, and I think that they improved enough aspects that I could say this is the probably the superior version of Rogue Legacy.

That being said I found the last stretch of this game is incredibly tedious. I opted to use the house rule modifiers to get through the last 2 bosses, instead of spending hours grinding one hit kill mobs to get what is effectively the same result. Maybe the first game suffered from this problem as well, but I didn’t mind as much then because A) it was my first time playing a game like this, and it all felt so fresh that the grind was more tolerable B) I had more free time to grind back then.

I also think that the game gets a bit muddy with all the additional systems, currencies, and NPCs with theyre own skill trees/items. Thankfully you can ignore it and just focus on the castle upgrades, as well as the blacksmith and enchantress. I’m sure for some peeps this added a lot to the game but I just felt overwhelmed with it.

At the end of the day I still really loved this game, it retains the spirit of the original so well while also making its own creative choices, so I will continue to sing it’s praises to any MFer who will listen.

I haven't touched the original game since I was a stupid idiot kid who couldn't form coherent sentences. Now I can. Rogue Legacy 2 has really smooth movement, a plethora of unique weapons, and a lot of challenging boss fights. The areas are all unique and a lot of fun to explore. The scar challenges serve as additional challenge fights and some tutorials (I didn't know you could dash cancel the barbarian attacks until I did that scar). The music is good and cool. My only real issue with the game is the resolve system. I think losing health as a result of picking up an item is a cool idea, but the vast majority of the items don't really feel worth it for how little resolve you have especially at the start. Everything else is cool and fun and I'm looking forward to casually playing through multiple NG+ runs.

Rogue Legacy 2 is fun at first, good first impression, but then it dawns upon you how much grinding they expect out of you. To me, it felt like some of these bosses I was not gonna beat until I just grinded out enough damage/damage resistance to be able to withstand them.

Another problem is the game just feels extremely slow. You want to explore to find relics, money, other important loot, and you gotta backtrack if you miss shit. Dead Cells, for example, has teleporters everywhere to make it easy as shit, and this game they are spread far a part usually.

The gameplay is fine/good depending on what weapons you get, and what relics you find. It's all rng what class you get at the beginning and what relics you find. I didn't find a lot of the classes particularly appealing except the pirate with the surfboard. The surfboard is so genuinely fun to use and it is locked by being the second weapon.

You unlock second weapons through a special currency you get from beating bosses (once each NG), doing the challenges, and completing npc dialogue lines. The challenges are... challenging! and I couldnt even do some of them; and I never even finished a character dialogue line so I never got that. Not only are they kind of limited, but that store locks stuff like this: "Buy 2 more items to unlock this"; just very annoying to get to.

The relics are another thing where I feel like most of them are boring/useless to me. I only want a specific set of them, and If I dont get them, I'm not having fun.

So like, if you really wanna turn your brain off and grind, I guess Rogue Legacy 2 will do that.

Não sei se fui jogar com a expectativa maior do que deveria, mas eu esperava mais.
As áreas são muito similares a cada run e o jogo exige um certo grind para progredir, além de que não senti que eu tivesse o poder de fazer builds muito diferentes a cada run, fazendo tudo depender dos upgrades permanentes, equipamentos e classe que está sendo utilizada no momento.
Apesar desses empecilhos na minha experiência, o jogo tem uma gameplay bem agradável, algumas classes são bem divertidas de jogar. Não joguei o 1, então não consigo avaliar a evolução em relação ao seu antecessor.

One of the best Roguelites I have ever played, with tons of upgrades and play styles to make things interesting up through the main game and beyond into the plethora of post game activities. NameBrand

I bought Rogue Legacy 2 on a whim after I saw that it launched with warm reviews during the 1.0 launch, and I have to say that I'm really happy I did! Rogue Legacy 2 has slowly crept into being one of my all time favorite Roguelites that I believe easily deserves a chance at becoming one of yours.

I'm going to come right out and address what I think will be the main drawback for most people: Rogue Legacy 2 is a slow burn game. It's not one of those 20 hour one and done Roguelites. We're talking 40 - 60 hours here to roll credits for the first time. Before you get to the late-game content. Because of the slow burn nature, there's going to be times you'll finish a run with a ludicrous amount of gold, and you'll throw it into a bunch of upgrades thinking to yourself that "yeah, I'm really gonna FEEL this one", only to find after you level up that the changes were VERY marginal. I think that might be frustrating for people looking for that instant gratification... but I wasn't! I found that the core gameplay is indeed, still a Roguelite, which means the best weapon in the game... is your own skill. So I thought that the level ups and all that, were nice, and they did contribute to the reason I rolled credits, but knowing enemy and boss attack patterns is going to be what saves your bacon 90% of the time.

Now with that out of the way, for those of you looking for a deep, long, and rich experience, you'll find that here! There's a LOT of different weapons, talents, and magic spells that you'll have the opportunity to master, and on top of that you can find relics with modifiers that you can synergize with each other, and heirlooms that give you new movement abilities that allow "metroidvania-esque" access to other areas of the map. On top of that, you'll encounter strange modifiers to your characters that will continue to make every run feel like a unique experience, should you so choose it to be.

I say "should you so choose it to be," because if you desire, you can eliminate a lot of the randomosity of Rogue Legacy 2. Many of these options are built right into the base game through a few unlockables and can help you in just about any way you can think of, from preferring to start with a certain loadout, to freezing the random generation of the environments. If you're looking for the game to be even more tailored, you can change the house rules, which contains tons and tons of accessibility options that you just don't see in games today. I really commend the devs for including that! It ensures that you can have a fun experience no matter how you decide to play the game.

I personally loved my journey through the game, I thought that the trial and error process was really addicting and engaging, the upgrades tickled me, and finding insane relic synergies was always a treat. The bosses I must say, are really well designed, and gave me a LOT of trouble whenever I first encountered one (to the point where I thought they were impossible), but now I can take on one or two with ease, as a testament to all the practice and memorization I've put in. The soundtrack and overall sound design is really well done and all complements each other, and while it wasn't particularly the focus of my attention, I appreciate the lore fragments scattered across the world through secret rooms and the like.

Some real bang for your buck value Rogue Legacy 2 offers is the diversity and breadth of content that it offers. In any given play session I can tailor the entire experience to suit what I feel like doing. Do I have an hour on my hands to collect a bunch of gold? Do I have a few minutes to do some combat challenges? Do I want to go straight to the boss to try and get some of the patterns down? Maybe I just want to collect a few relics and try a new boss. Maybe I'll explore the next area looking for the next heirloom. Etc. You can fit the game in just about any time gap you have available, to fit any kind of gaming mood you're in, and should you need to, you can save and quit at any point during a run, and return to the game right where you left off.

Overall, I really hope that more people get into Rogue Legacy 2 and see what it has to offer, because there is a TON here. And I've only played up to the credits! There's apparently a whole post game section complete with its own set of bosses, rules, armor, challenges and more for me to discover, so I might just be at the tip of the iceberg, which is insane to think about! But even if you just roll credits, where I'm at at the time of this review, I still think it's an incredible experience that many people will be able to find a lot of value in. Take the dive!

I just fundamentally don't like this many permanent upgrades, this much resource gathering, this much 'play and play again to make the next run easier'. I thought that the 'True Rogue' one life mode would offer something more compelling, but it's more of a one shot randomizer than it is something curated and of genuine interest. The entire class and heir system feels like it goes out the window, not to mention the narrative and spatial logic.

This is both a pretty different and an obligatory game compared to the original. It is the original elaborated in the common ways, but it prioritizes different aspects of its gameplay. This is a much more movement heavy game, and it's easy to see not just in the level and boss design, but also by its odd tutorializing and its slow-roll of movement options. I'm not sure I needed a tutorial for how to double jump, but it's there and grinds whatever run you're on to a halt. The upgrades and the areas that they lock off, that make a first run into a pretty linear experience, call into question why it wasn't just a collection of sequential levels in the first place. The larger design feels light; lightly roguelike, lightly metroidvania, but the moment to moment design is a that of a pretty good combat platformer.

I enjoyed the boss fights, the enemies with different properties---restricted or unrestricted by walls, firing projectiles that pass through or not. It creates compelling logic and rhythms to combat, though I don't think the levels themselves are that interesting to move around in. I can't say I enjoyed a lot of the weapons, but when I found one I liked I gladly stuck with it (the Valkyrie's spear). There's a nice sense of survival to it, of managing and risking your HP. There are a number of nice ideas and moments here, but as I said up top, I don't care for the delivery method.

Wow! I just beat this on Switch, took me 20-25 hours for my first playthrough. A symphony of metroidvania, roguelike, and soulslike gameplay (all the "like" genres) in perfect concert. The blend of persistent and resetting progress is done in such a way where every run is useful -- either for information, resource gathering, or actual progress -- and I kept saying "one more run" until 1 in the morning. It's also really hard in the way Hollow Knight/Souls games can be, where every boss you beat brings feelings of elation. Thankfully, there are also plenty of guardrails whether it's linear RPG progress (you can grind out stats until you're able to rip most bosses apart) or "House Rules" that you can tweak to make the game easier or harder.

Awesome awesome awesome. An easy GOTY contender.

P.S. I only beat the game once and it seems like there's way, way more to do??? Can't wait to dig into it more after I clear some other stuff out.

Rogue Legacy 2 has a lot in common with Rogue Legacy, including its progression and level structure, but adds character classes and some NPCs to interact with between attempts. I didn't find much to like about these additions, unfortunately, and the sheer amount of stuff here feels like it completely breaks open some of the cracks in the original game's design. Although I think it is pretty fundamentally flawed from a systems and implementation perspective, Rogue Legacy 2 still plays fairly well -- it can be fun to just blast through a couple of runs.

There is more narrative than in the first game, but it didn't land for me at all. The story of the castle and bosses is expounded upon at every opportunity, but without successfully conveying anything about what is going on. It seems like it is trying to be mysterious, but it just feels like disjointed nonsense.
The added NPC characters have a lot to say, most of which is rote jokes that don't really land. I didn't find much to like about or care about in them. (Also, the game sticks with the idea that you play as a series of heirs, so... are these NPCs all immortal or something? Maybe it is explained in dialog that I skipped.)
There is so much writing in this game, but none of it does the baseline job of giving my character a reason to explore the castle or care.

Control is simple, with a jump, dash, and "kick flip" which can be used to bounce off of enemies. They all feel pretty responsive and dodging and navigating with these abilities is usually fairly easy.
Some implementation and style choices hamstring this for me, however. The complex rules about what can reset your dash and jump make it hard to track which are available to you at any given time and the lack of adequate forgiveness mechanics around the kick flip and jumps make them feel unresponsive during the most intense situations. Many of the attacks and enemies are hard to read -- hits often surprise you in a bad way.

Each of the classes you can play as has a unique weapon and ability, though I found I didn't like using many of them. Rogue Legacy 2 tries to incentivize using different classes by giving them mastery levels which reward passive bonuses, but like most of the upgrades in the game they are too granular to have much impact or be an incentive.
The bard, however, is a standout. They throw out musical notes which they can use the kick flip to jump off of and cause damage in an area. It changes how you think about the space and how combat works in a fun, expressive way. I would have loved more classes with this level of creativity and uniqueness.
Magic spells can mix things up a bit as well, but are mostly similar versions of a projectile or AoE effect.

On a run-to-run basis, the game adds variety through artifacts, which give you unique abilities or effects. Wildly, collecting these past a certain point reduces your max health (!?), actively disincentivizing you from doing the thing that might make your run varied and interesting. This feels like a decision made by someone who doesn't understand the genre. As in the first game, they seem to expect the permanent progression to be the thing that carries you through the game. However...

Although it is the core of Rogue Legacy 2, I found a lot of mechanical problems with the permanent progression systems.
There are a ton of upgrades to buy, paid for with money you earn on each run. They are intensely granular, so most of them just don't really matter except in aggregate. I found myself just buying whatever I could afford, rather than working towards goals and getting excited about upgrades.
Many of the upgrades are unclear or only have second order effects, which makes them unsatisfying. I can upgrade my rune capacity, but I have to buy runes to fill that capacity, so is it valuable right now? I can upgrade my total equipment weight, increasing the amount I can wear before I hit the Dark Souls-style weight breakpoints which only seem to affect how many artifacts I can pick up in the dungeon before they start reducing my max health, I guess? I can upgrade my focus to improve spell crits, but is the Wizard's regular attack a spell? I can buy and upgrade about 10 different types of equipment, but the benefits seem to be set-bonus based, so I can't tell what they are until I buy them all.
Even the most expensive upgrades (which aren't very exciting regardless) are removed as long-term goals by the Charon mechanic, which prevents you from saving up in any meaningful way. The game wants you to afford these with gold farming runs through easy parts of the castle, but I never felt motivated to do so and the fast travel to later areas makes this less than compelling.
The first game was small and simple enough that this progression system worked and farming runs made more sense. Here it has broken under the weight of everything else that is going on.

I had an ok time with Rogue Legacy 2, but it doesn't have enough variety between runs or sense of real progression to overcome the control and systemic flaws and make me want to keep playing it. If you were a massive fan of the first one, you may find a lot to like here, since it is basically just more and better, for some definition of better. If you just want a fun roguelike with great mechanics, play Hades, Binding of Isaac, or Spelunky.

A very easy game to slip into, whether it's a quick run at lunch time or a longer session with some TV on in the background. Minute to minute, it's fun, dashing and dodging and exploring the castle. Compared to the original, the new classes do a lot to shake it up, and I'm personally a big fan of the Boxer and the Astromancer. However, there are a lot of nagging issues, none of them big enough to be deal breakers, but in aggregate make the game just, underwhelming.

Take upgrades, for instance. Like the first game, the rogue-lite loop is that you do a run through the castle, looting and pillaging, and when you inevitably die, you get to spend all the money you earned upgrading your castle to give permanent bonuses to your future runs. The castle is a gigantic, bloated mess, with THREE seperate upgrade rooms, each with their own independent level for every stat. And you can unlock additional levels. For all of them! It seems aimed at a hardcore crowd ready to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours leveling up their hitpoints over and over again, but for the casual player it means you can finish a run with a respectable 5000 gold and find all you can buy is an imperceptible +1% chance to crit, or change your HP from 502 to 503.

The story, or rather the tone, is likewise a bit of a mess. Most of the story is told through journals left all over the castle. You can stop to read them and absolutely kill the pace of your run. If you do, you'll find a sombre tail of frustrated revolution and uncaring aristocrats. One area tells the story of dredging the bodies of the dead from a lake, but being unable to bury them because the living are too few in number. The sombre tone is completely at odds with the rest of the game- the resolution to that story is a boss fight with two gigantic cartoon skeleton pirates, apparently created from everyone who died in the lake.

The battle between these two tones isn't that dissimilar to the first game. They both feature IBS and twist reveals of tragic villains, but the massively increased budget of the sequel has left more time and space for jokes. It's not just IBS for fart jokes, there's super IBS, and pizza, endless, endless pizza jokes. I think they should have axed the more serious elements completely and just focused on the lighthearted content.

Overall, middling.

If only that '2' hadn't come at such a prohibitive cost.

Rogue Legacy 2 is the long awaited sequel to 2013's indie darling Rogue Legacy, and it promises to be the first game, but better. The first impression left by the game indeed points to that: it has sharper, more modern visuals; it controls much better, with spin kicks in particular being a much more comfortable maneuver, and it even gives you the dash ability right off the bat, which is important since that was at the center of much of the movement and combat tech in the first game.

The defining aspects of Rogue Legacy are still here, with the same core loop of picking an heir on death, the same NPCs, the family estate screen, Charon, and the randomly generated map. Except now, instead of Castle Hamson, there is an entire kingdom to explore, with all-new areas filled with a variety of new challenges. It sounds like what every RL1 fan could wish for, however, inexplicably at first, the game feels slow, and is rather exhausting compared to its prequel. The reason for that is apparent if you take a step back and analyze RL and RL2 side-by-side.

Rogue Legacy is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated castle and attempts to find and defeat four bosses. During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold and blueprints: gold can be used to both upgrade your characters and build equipment you have blueprints for. Secret bosses that can be fought at the locations where defeated bosses once were. Optionally, after the credits, the player can start NG+, which is the same game with harder enemy placements.

Rogue Legacy 2 is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated kingdom and attempts to find and defeat a number of bosses (ten by my count, depends on whether you count void beasts or not). During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold, red ether, ore, souls and blueprints which, upon death... Gold is used to buy upgrades, Gold + Ether is used to buy runes, Gold + Ore is used to build equipment, Ether + Ore can be exchanged into more Souls, and Souls are used to level up the family estate and upgrade the shops so the stats and items in them can be upgraded further with the respective materials. After finishing the game, the player gains the ability to switch threads, which is moving back and forth between NG+ states with a series of customizable modifiers that change a variety of things about the game's balance, including but not limited to powering enemies up, increasing the map size and unlocking upgraded versions of the game's bosses. Not all modifiers aren't available from the start: most of them must be unlocked by beating higher numbered threads.

To say nothing of scars, mastery ranks, Unity levels, weight classes, Charon's tribute level and so on. A common occurrence when playing RL2 is to ask oneself "why is this here? How does it make the game any better?", and a lot of the time, the answer is "it does not": Many of its additions to the formula feel overdesigned to the point of being bothersome or poorly designed in a way they're plain skippable. The best display of the latter case is the relics, which are an evolution of the mechanic where you prayed for help in the first game and got a boon (or curse). RL2's Relics are items that add passive traits to your character. They're found randomly in certain rooms across the kingdom, and have a whole new stat, called Resolve, associated with them: Resolve is allocated when you take a relic, and having less than 100 Resolve reduces your Max HP to that amount as a percentage.

Relics are, aside from the revamped classes, the reason why RL2's main menu offers a glossary to help the player navigate the specialized vocabulary that comes with item and skill descriptions now. Much of the effects feel like reading TCG cards, and although a departure from the original, that's potentially a good thing: TCGs have these crazy interactions and combos that are part of the fun of playing the game. It must be fun to look for relic combos and... no, in reality, the drawbacks are far too punishing to pick relics up willy-nilly. Their effects seldom compensate the loss of HP, rarely match your class and even less frequently interact with one another. Plus, you can't even swap them out if you find a better set, the only way to get rid of them is to die, and yes, you do lose them on death, so when fighting bosses, unless you're planning to win first try, you can't count on them either.

Ah, yes, the bosses. What should be highlights are actually the most infuriating parts of the experience. The problem with the bosses in RL2 is that, individually, their attacks are fine: there's always a clear window, a clear movement pattern that spares you from the punishment. It's the overlaps of attacks that often leave the player without a place to run to. This almost always happens with bosses that are two or more separate entities that act independently, or those that summon minions, like Tubal, but is a frequent occurrence in other fights as well, where a low recovery period on bosses' attacks, combined with them being randomly picked instead of having triggers or patterns, makes it so they overlap each other and thus cancel their safe spots. Boss fights in RL2 basically force the player into playing classes with long invulnerability periods, and even then, feel less like a test of skill and more like a grind against the RNG.

Mind you, this is not a new issue! RL's bosses had the exact same problem, as anyone who fought against, say, upgraded Alexander will tell you. The difference was that the main bosses' patterns were simple enough that this never became an issue, and upon killing them, you were given enough gold so that the next area and boss's difficulty would be in a comfortable spot in your next run, if you happened to die. As for the upgraded versions, they were easy to unlock, and you could just rematch immediately if you lost, letting you focus on the fight instead of making the trek to the door over and over again.

RL may have been a janky game, but it's impossible to argue that it liked to waste your time. RL2, on the other hand? Upgrades rarely have an impact, bosses barely give any gold, there's multiple currencies whose only purpose is to stall progress... just think about it, the addition of souls is solely so you have to grind to unlock more grind. And to make things worse, the narrative is contrived so that you have to play multiple NG+ to get to the end of it. Take a wild guess at how many playthroughs are needed to get to the true ending. Two? Three? How about eight? You need to go all the way up to NG+7 to see the end of a story that could very effectively be told in three playthroughs, and even then, the pay off would not be worth it. The entire game is designed like it desperately had to justify two years of early access.

Like I said before, RL2 did bring a bunch of improvements with it. The vast majority of the game's issues lie within its balance, which could easily be tweaked; in fact, it seems cutting down on the grind is what most of the game's top mods concern themselves with.. But as much as I'd like to see this dream version of RL2, where its strong points are enhanced instead of its weak ones, that's not the game I played. RL2, as it came out, is a terrible experience, an unbelievably unsatisfying grindfest. I remember playing 30 hours of the original Rogue Legacy when it came out and having a blast: it amused me for a while, then left before it got boring. I played 60 hours of Rogue Legacy 2, all the while waiting for the fun part to begin, and it felt absolutely miserable.

Extremely solid gameplay with a great variety in combat abilities, classes, perks, and items that made it fun to discover what the game had to offer. Sadly, that discovery and randomness grew stale as I was eventually faced with imbalanced difficulty spikes and bad progression grind.

Starting with the good - Rogue Legacy 2 feels great to play. Within minutes of my very first run, I was having fun. After my first death, it felt good to spend what I had earned on upgrade and I was excited to jump back in with a new class and new random abilities to discover. It got its roguelike hooks in me early.

Expanding my skill tree was initially satisfying as you're not only working towards upgrades for your character but also unlocking new classes and features to make future runs a bit easier. However, as you get further into the skill tree, it becomes a repetitive grind with repeating skills at increasing cost. Every skill upgrade offers a minute improvement to one trait - +1 strength, +1 intelligence, etc. All of which are barely noticeable during combat until you're several upgrades deep. It also doesn't take long for the upgrades to get so expensive that you're lucky to be able to upgrade 1-2 nodes per run depending on how well you do. And since each upgrade point doesn't feel significant, it's hard to feel like you're making much noticeable progress when you're only able to afford 1 upgrade at the end of a 30 minute run. This sort of thing feels like artificial padding to get you to spend more time with the game than really organically feels necessary.

The game is broken up into 6 regions with one boss per region. The zones all feel a bit different with some variation on enemies. And each of the 6 bosses offer their own challenges and movesets to learn and master. RL2 also has some semi-Metroidvania-y elements to it as you earn permanent upgrades when you finish areas that let you gain access to new areas you aren't able to access previously. So if you've beaten bosses 1 and 2 already, on your next run you can jump straight to the 3rd zone.

After taking my time beating the first zone, I flew through zones 2 and 3 without much trouble before hitting a massive wall in zone 4 when the difficult takes an insane spike. And due to the aforementioned slow upgrade system, the game turned into a tedious grind of doing a 30 minute run in easier zones to earn money, buy an upgrade or two, try the new zone, die without earning enough for a new upgrade, repeat. It honestly sucked and almost made me quit the game. Luckily, the game has fantastic custom difficult options that make it easy to tweak parts of the game ever so slightly to make it easier to push through these difficulty walls to compensate for the game's lack of balance.

After powering through several difficult roadblocks, I did eventually beat the game and excitedly dove back into NG+.
And that's when I realized that, while my skill tree was maybe only 15% complete, I had seen everything that the game had to offer me. I've played every class, I've tried every weapon and ability, I've seen every perk. The randomness of the hero generation in this game is a pretty fun gimmick, but it never ends up really flowing together in any kind of organic way that lets you feel like you're crafting fun builds like in other roguelikes like Hades or Slay the Spire. I played Hades for 120 hours and constantly felt like I was discovering new builds and new synergies between abilities I didn't know I could pair together. In RL2, that synergy was extremely rare to find.

All-in-all, Rogue Legacy 2 is an excellent roguelite that feels fantastic to play and I had a lot of fun with it. But it sadly suffers pretty significantly from balance issues in both its difficulty curve and upgrade economy, as well as randomness fatigue due to a lack of good build synergies.

+ Gameplay and combat feel excellent
+ Great exploration with Metroidvania-lite features
+ Lots of fun classes, weapons, abilities, spells, perks, and items to discover
+ A fun sense of humor with some goofy random perks
+ Solid soundtrack
+ Great custom difficulty options

- Poor difficulty balancing
- Mid-to-late game grind due to horrible economy balancing with minute skill improvements and expensive upgrades
- No real way to control or create a fun build. Random skills, perks, and abilities rarely have synergy.
- Randomness grows stale instead of exciting

Man, this game is pretty boring and I feel pretty confused about where all the praise is coming from. To be clear, and to begin on a positive note, I do see and respect just how much ambition went into this game. The devs spent a lot of time and energy on every aspect of this game. It's like Rogue Legacy quadrupled. The problem is that this is the problem! There's way too much thought here and not enough fun. As the first example, let me mention that this game has inflation in it. Actual fucking inflation. As if that's a fun real-life concept to put in your game.

So, the game design is still the same as it ever was. You play a sort of light metroidvania in sections, where you do have access to the entire map, but are really only meant to play each section in increments where you die over and over but make it out with gold to upgrade your castle so you can beat the area you were focusing on and move onto the next. In 2013, I loved this design since it felt fresh and new and I get very addicted to games with tons of unlocks and bars to fill, which is really the only thing Rogue Legacy has going for it. As a combat platformer, it's perfectly fine and controls well, but the level and enemy attack design always feels either simple or just annoying, and that hasn't changed at all. This sequel is exactly the same on that front. Some basic jumping around on platforms you are very unlikely to miss, and some smacking enemies around in situations that are mostly easy until they just feel unfair.

The core gameplay is fine. It's all of the thousands of layers of other stuff that either adds nothing or detracts from the experience as far as I'm concerned. For one thing, I'm not sure why this game has like 175 classes when most of them are just minor variations. Gunslinger is just a minor variant on Archer. I forget their specific names, but the black hole mage is a major difference from the regular mage and both are fun to play, but I really struggle to tell you any major differences between Knight, Duelist, Valkyrie, Assassin, Barbarian and Ronin. They're all sword users and, sure, they have differing attack damage, range and their own unique class skill, but the core experience is extremely similar. You jump close to enemies, bop them on the head and dodge attacks. Archer is at least wholly different in that you shoot arrows in stead, which changes the strategy, and the black hole mage is also cool in how it changes your whole playstyle and makes you "lay traps" instead of punching enemies in the face, but the melee characters all feel more or less the same except some of them do shit damage and are as such frustrating.

Then you have all of the other stuff. The fact that there are 7000 statuses to memorize the name of. You've now found an "empathy" which lowers your "handicap" in... Hell, I forget what the part of the game was called. This game needs to come with a physical glossary so you can look up what the countless words mean, and the worst part is that none of them seem to matter. So this item gives my main weapon the ability to "apply Combo". Okay. And what's that? I haven't noticed any difference when I pick that thing up. And that's really perhaps the worst part about the game for me. Picking items up. Not only do most of the items suck with very boring effects like "slightly raise crit chance", the devs have also included a sort of tax system for items. Picking one up severely lowers your maximum HP, to the point where you're only allowed to safely pick up 2 or 3 items. I have no idea why they did this to their game, since it absolutely murders run variety. Every run feels the same when the items are both lame and prohibitively expensive to pick up and as you traverse the same few rooms now assembled in a slightly different order.

They do sell an upgrade for this, because of course they do, so maybe you can have more fun with the items with a raised "resolve" (that's what the item limit system is called, because everything needs a name to memorize), but the problem is the aforementioned inflation. After you've purchased some unlocks, there's actually a text pop-up telling you that the price of labor has increased and will continue increasing. So not only does the game have a simple tier system where upgrade A1 costs 50 coints, A2 costs 100 coins and so on, the game also has an inflation system, so once you've purchased A1 and A2 at a total of 150 coints, B1 will then change from costing 50 coins to 75 coins. After you've purchased B1 and B2 at the new, inflated, cost of 75+175, C1 will change from 50 to 75 to 100 coins and so on. Why? Why the fuck would you do this? Who would ever want inflation in their videogame? This is the actual worst. Does this go away if I spend like 150 hours grinding out more resources and coins (because of course this game desn't just have gold, it also has 47 other currencies)? Do I care? No.

Another thing is the trait system. I remember RL1 as being a good mix of good and bad traits, but in this game, I feel like I either don't notice having a trait at all (which does happen often) or it's some negative bullshit that makes me kill the character immediately. Everything is greyscale now! Nope, instant suicide. Only critical hits deal damage! Hell no, instant suicide. Everything is sepia toned and all of the sounds are tinny and distorted! Niet, instant suicide. Your character now shrinks on taking a hit and you have to smash everything to desperately find mushrooms because Mario! Nahhhh, instant suicide. You are now a pacifist and can't deal (but can take) damage! Yeah, no, instant suicide and rage quit.

This game is well-programmed and I didn't run into any glitches. It looks and sounds very good, even though I preferred the pixel art of the original over the cartoon hand-drawn in this game. The platforming and combat is simplistic, but servicable and can even be enjoyable. At least some of the bosses were pretty cool. The ambition here is massive. But it's not fun. It's a grindfest so offensive that even a grind addict like me hates it. There's been too much thought put into pesky, annoying aspects of the game and not enough on the fun. There are too many classes with too little variation. Too many unlocks that split it into too many more unlocks, and then you have to unlock more unlocks by finishing New Game+18. And the game has motherfucking inflation. That should just tell you everything you need to know about how boring this game is. I'm done. I've stuck with it for some 10+ hours because I'm such a roguelite nut and because I had fond memories of the first game, but this game just sucks and isn't even a game. It's a boring unlock simulator with inflation in it. No, I'm never letting that go. They put inflation in their boring-ass game! I really have no idea how so many others are praising this game. It sucks and I hate it.

I just don't like its style.

I played the first game, enjoyed it somewhat, but never fell in love with it in the same way I did with for example Dead Cells. The artistic style was just too cold and glistening, and the silliness not of the type I enjoyed much (also the characters looked weirdly bulky and a bit chibi to me - neither something I enjoy). The second game doesn't really change any of that so it was going to be an uphill battle anyway.

It doesn't help that in trying to improve the game, it makes some user-unfriendly choices that I really didn't appreciate, like not showing the player what they're choosing between before they've actually made the choice. It makes the choice pointless and the game a grind before having explored enough of it to have the information to actually make meaningful choices.

The action also feels clunky, especially in how you have to position your character; though that might be unfair as positioning can be a challenge in other such games as well, e.g. Dead Cells. I just never enjoyed it here or felt that I had enough alternatives to overcome it successfully enough.

The story offers some interest with its mystery, but not enough to drag me through it. Writing this review a month or two after last playing it I can't even really tell you what it's all about, some guy going crazy? It also wants to be too funny for its own good, undermining the seriousness with constant silliness.

I also found its bullet hell difficult to handle already in the intro level, and I found little enjoyment in completing most levels (excluding the challenge levels; those were pretty fun). I did appreciate the opportunity to fiddle around with the difficulty settings and I did enjoy the game more once I had turned some stuff lower or off, but after 5 or more hours I'm pretty sure this series just isn't for me.

I had a decent time with it on a lower difficulty, there's a lot about the gameplay loop that I enjoy. The core combat was fun, the controls are tight, and the class designs are good. Levels are laid out nice, exploring feels good, and the metroidvania mechanics are cool.

And that's about where the good ends.

OVERALL: 5/10
Combat Design: 5/10
World Design: 7/10
Narrative Design: 2/10
Story / Plot: 2/10
Aesthetic Visuals: 7/10

The game is going to be too hard for 90% of game players. It's brutally unforgiving, enemy and trap damage is massive, there are so few avenues to regaining health in a run, and what is there is either pitiful (the rune that gives 1% HP on enemy death is a joke) or insanely random and not within the player's control whatsoever. If you're having a rough time, you MUST break every box/lamp/etc for the hope of a health drop, which is NOT a fun play pattern at all (especially when even tiny book or candle props might sometimes have health hidden in them).

So, sure, they have difficulty options, that's great. The first thing I did was make it so enemy bodies don't hurt you, because, insanely, only one class has an ability that gives them iframes. There are certainly games where not giving the player iframes is rational, but this isn't one of them. Enemies move in crazy patterns and many of them fly, half the enemies shoot projectiles, of which there are many many types. With your limited mobility and complete lack of iframes, avoiding every enemy, hazard, and projectile is going to be impossible for anyone who isn't a gamer savant who probably streams on twitch semi-professionally. The screen is, at any moment, so full of damaging entities in random patterns that it's just ridiculous.

Next I lowered enemy health a bit (that's not bad at all, you do good damage to all normal enemies) and enemy damage by 20% and then 50% because it's honestly such a slog, you die so fast.

In spite of all of that, I was having fun! Until it came to beating the bosses. They are plainly just not fun. The game acts like you have more methods to avoid damage than you do, and the projectile patterns and some boss behaviors are just flat out sadistic to a degree that isn't even remotely fun. I got through three of them, but on the wizard in the library, he has a second phase that is perhaps one of the worst boss designs I've ever seen in a game? I decided I had no motivation to keep going once I got to that, it just felt like the designers didn't respect me as a player whatsoever.

My biggest criticism beyond how crazy it is to avoid damage is that, unlike other roguelites, this one does NOT have massive player power spikes in 90% of runs. The vast majority of "relics" are not only not powerful, many of them are just flat out strictly bad and offer little to no value to the majority of classes. What makes that worse is they made the baffling decision to hide what relics do until you use them for the first time. After 8 hours with the game, I just determined to look them up mid-run because that's bad game design when relics can offer literally ZERO benefit at least 50% of the time. Turns out even looking them up didn't offer much, it just showed me that, yeah, no, I don't want almost any of them.

The bad relic design is made even worse when the entire game is built around a system where you can only equip a couple of them per run, and if you go over a certain value of a meter that fills up, you start losing health! The idea of gating player power progression in a roguelite behind HEALTH when the powers aren't even good is just...absolutely insane? As a game designer, I struggle to think of a justification for going that path, it's just so anti-fun from top to bottom.

The only power spikes you get are "traits," which are assigned to you AT CHARACTER SELECTION and completely random. Also, most of the good ones make you take 2x damage, guaranteeing you always kind of feel like ♥♥♥♥ even when you're more powerful. Again, literally anti-fun design. I understand trade-offs, but they should've brainstormed literally any trade-offs other than "make the player die faster", because I can think of at least dozen potential ones within their design, and yet they seem to think the ONLY way to balance these things is by taking more health away from the player.

They have a huge skill tree to invest in over time, but after 10 hours, it's just grinding. You don't get meaningful power from the skill tree, you don't feel like you're actually getting stronger over time, and the lack of run-specific power spikes makes the lack of skill tree power spikes even more egregious. The tree nodes start costing SO MUCH GOLD that it feels like it was designed purely for the small audience of fans they have who are addicts of their game sinking in HUNDREDS of hours, which, sure, you should find ways to benefit them, but Hades did literally everything better in terms of run design and progression design, making the game accessible to all players instead of just pro gamers.