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.
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.