The epic quest to carry on the legacy begins, for I am the second Rogue of this lineage, following the footsteps of the first Rogue. Armed with the tales of the grandeur my predecessor described, a tranquil oasis in a desert of sameness, I embarked on a mission to surpass their legacy.

But as I wandered through the castle, something felt amiss. The walls stretched endlessly, and the enemies were more generic than the love interest in a romantic comedy. It's as if I've been here for hours, but wasn't it just a brief three minutes of gameplay? These twisting corridors left me disoriented, like a mirage in a desert, and the light, blinding like a thousand suns, made me question my reality. Could it be that none of this is real? Have I lost my mind?

Rogue the first, you've been my greatest inspiration, a solid wall in these trying times. Your description of the oasis was like a promise of salvation. But my journey takes a strange turn as the walls blur, and the heat fries my brain. Is this desert real, or am I succumbing to a heatstroke-induced mirage?

Perhaps I'm delirious, but this cruel desert feels like a place of despair, not hope. I wander aimlessly, doubting my legacy. The oasis that should have been my reward is nowhere to be seen. Maybe those haters were right; perhaps I'm doomed to die in this forsaken desert.

But then, in a moment of clarity, I realize that my predecessor's legacy is more than just words. It's a guiding light, a beacon leading me to salvation. And there it is, the oasis! Rogue the first, you were the one that saved me.

As I eagerly rush towards the water's edge, I unexpectedly collide with an invisible wall. What just happened? A magical genie materializes on the other side, taunting me with three wishes. Of course, I wish for water, and can we remove that pesky wall? But the genie's response is infuriating – "Maybe."

My frustration grows, but the genie delays my wishes, using the "Gimmie a Moment!" card. I'm left stranded, waiting. Patience wears thin, but I keep singing that refrain – "You're gonna be the one that saves me!"

Alas, today is not the day the genie saves me from the blistering sun. "You're gonna have to wait; I used the 'Gimmie a Moment!' card," the genie retorts. As I sit, my oasis and my wishes remain tantalizingly out of reach. I'm left with the ever-persistent refrain echoing in my mind – "You're gonna be the one that saves me."

To Rogue Legacy 2, I say, you've succeeded in creating a bewildering and engaging world. The legacy of the first Rogue is not just a description; it's a challenging and mesmerizing experience. For this, I award you a strong 8 out of 10. Your wonder is real.

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.

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.

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.

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.