Rogue Legacy 2 excels at its core rogue-lite gameplay loop when it comes to platforming, combat, and the progression system. It is very fun and addictive at first. The hand-drawn visuals and fantastic music further elevate the experience. Unfortunately, it suffers from a similar issue as Crash 4 or Super Mario Odyssey, where it unnecessarily prolongs the gameplay loop or progress. In fact, I would argue that it's even worse because you have to endure this excessive grinding in order to beat the game. After a while, I found myself growing fatigued of playing this game, despite its excellent gameplay loop.

However, it is important to point out that I still believe that Rogue Legacy 2 is solid overall because of its well-crafted core gameplay loop that remains strong even when it's padding itself. Unlike Skul: The Hero Slayer, which reveals many fundamental rogue-lite gameplay issues as it starts to drag on, this game manages to keep itself together, but this only amplifies my frustration as it could have easily removed the unnecessary grinding. If it weren't there, I would've had no problem considering it one of the top games in its genre alongside Dead Cells & Hades.

I would strongly recommend this game only if you're ready to invest a considerable amount of time into reaching your main goal. I'm gonna put it down because I want to move on with playing other games, but I can see myself crawling back to this game eventually.

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

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.
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In Short: A game lacking the charm of its predecessor while expanding on some of its least appealing elements.

There's something missing in Rogue Legacy 2, deep at the core. Despite not being a huge metroidvania fan, I was hooked by the relative simplicity of the original game. It built up its mechanics carefully as you delved deeper, presenting the player with just enough different options to feel varied without digging itself too deep into a systemic hole. Even bad runs felt like progress, and even the worst downside felt at least manageable.

Rogue Legacy 2 does not build upon its predecessor's achievements, however. Systems are overly complex out of the gate, with the game expanding its system of items and equipment in a way that feels like a chore to manage, and that undermines sense of progress regularly as a fairly successful run ends and offers little in the way of upgrades thanks to an inanely complicated array of different items and shops.

This division interacts negatively with the game's reduced emphasis on boss fights, as the overall power gain available to the player appears much lower - likely to avoid players blowing through a game that no longer requires multiple big boss fights every run. This more compressed power curve is then filtered through a wider array of stuff to buy, leading to the game feeling like a slog of grinding reliant on luck to break out and make progress.

In combat, the previously "nice to have" secondary weapons feel vital in a way that distracts from actually playing the game. A handful are too finicky, or too useless, to bother with. Still more feel too integral to the success of a run to ignore, despite offering little enjoyment to engage with or a frustrating amount of micromanagement to avoid being left helpless. Very rarely did they feel fun or rewarding to use, however.

Compounding the latter is an overall worse set of classes to work with. Some basics return, but the advanced classes have been reworked almost entirely, and almost entirely for the worse. Almost half of the classes feel like taking them on a run is setting yourself up for failure, without any subsequent reward. Ranged classes reveal themselves to be mostly bad, at least in the earlier portions I managed to get to before my interest wore thin.

This isn't necessarily a new phenomenon, the first game had a similar vibe at times, but it was far fewer and further between, and no class felt as far off of viable as so many of Rogue Legacy 2's do.

This sensation isn't helped by a design mismatch between the game's negative character traits, and its new focus on traversal instead of combat. Things that presented a challenge, or annoyance, in combat in the original game, are now capable of rendering a run entirely pointless - or so annoying that continuing to attempt it is simply a waste of time you could be having fun with some other game.

Where the latter game used to gate you by your ability to clear bosses, or persist long enough to overpower them, Rogue Legacy 2 demands instead that you tediously poke blindly around the map for special items - a feature borrowed from its inspiration that results mostly in runs feeling like a total waste of time as, again, no real progress is achieved thanks to your not finding an item. There's also far more platforming focused areas in Rogue Legacy 2, an element rendered infuriating when combined with the aforementioned negative traits.

Perhaps some people will find navigating Axis Mundi with a blind or movement reduced character a fun challenge. As profound hater of any platforming experience that isn't absolutely exceptional, I threw myself into the void and ended the run instead of wasting my time.

While the original Rogue Legacy offered its share of platforming, it felt marginal, and designed with the rest of the game in mind. Like an extra challenge, not a fundamental roadblock to continued enjoyment. Platforming was a vehicle for exploration, a necessity in a 2D world, but as with the best of its classic inspiration, rarely the focal point. Even contemporary counterpoints, like Dead Cells, manage to avoid this fundamental pitfall and use the platforming to make the game more engaging instead of just providing roadblocks.

This feels like a failure of design, as does much of Rogue Legacy 2. Like a game whose new elements were constructed in a black box, and then quickly rushed out and balanced on top of a stripped bare version of what already existed before anyone really sat down to hammer out the details of how it all fit together.

The visuals only soured me further. Clean and smooth, ultimately nice looking, but empty feeling. The simple charm of the first game, which evoked classic metroidvania games, is replaced here by something more akin to contemporary entries like Hollow Knight; which in turn makes the game stand out less. They aren't so much bad as they are uninspiring, and I was hoping for more than "good enough" for the followup to one of my favorite games of all time.

Assim como o primeiro, é bem viciante e bem divertido. A jogabilidade é extremamente simples, mas, como Hollow Knight, o importante é usar a jogabilidade simples pra passar por cenários difíceis.

A continuação é um bom upgrade do primeiro. Não é tão diferente em premissa e jogabilidade, e as mecânicas principais continuam as mesmas em sua maioria, assim como a estrutura geral do jogo, mas o maior balanceamento, diversidade de cenários e inimigos, e diferenciação e acrescimo de classes torna esse upgrade bem robusto.

Joguei obsessivamente por quase 100 horas, e tenho certeza que continuaria me divertindo se continuasse a jogar.

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.

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.