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
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