On paper, Rogue Legacy is something that I could really jive with. It's a roguelite, obviously, a genre that has really struggled to capture my attention for prolonged periods, but by way of classical platforming and slashing, gold coins exploding out of every chest, enemy, and piece of furniture. I'm susceptible to these sorts of things, admittedly, like jangling keys entertaining a cat.
These coins serve as currency for a progression system, which I also consider a saving grace for roguelikes - a way for me to meaningfully evaluate my progress and improvement beyond a nebulous self-examination of "skill" - and in tandem, hours blew by in Rogue Legacy as I smashed and crashed everything in sight, amassing my fortune and unlocking new goodies. I have always been a fan of treasure-seeking and optional midbosses, and this game has both in spades.
Unfortunately, though this is presumably one of the valid, intended playstyles by the developers - especially for those like myself who are not amazing at these zippy bullet-spam indies, and need the various upgrades to have a solid chance - playing this way is setting yourself up for torture. A vast majority of the armor pieces, runes, and skill tree nodes are effectively worthless, as everything comes back to attack strength and your health and mana pools. The new classes you can unlock are largely terrible, usually coming with severely reduced survivability in exchange for their gimmick, and since your character is rerolled each death, you may find your selection of kin to be exclusively useless, or putting you at a vast disadvantage. In the late game, even with the ability of picking one of 6 possible descendants, I was regularly faced with no good option, and resigned myself to a quick death in order to try my luck again.
It wasn't until I had accumulated most every treasure in the game that I started to clean up the remaining bosses and trying to finish the story, and despite having high-level equipment and well over 100 levels to my name, distributed evenly among all the experience nodes, I was still woefully unprepared for the more difficult challenges. Barring impeccable precision and endurance, it's significantly more advantageous to the player to skip all of the goodies, instead just pouring your fortune into the essential stats and abstaining from unlocking the gimped classes. Every time I saw a Mage, Spellsword, Assassin, Spelunker (when not treasure-seeking), and especially the godforsaken [REDACTED], my heart sank a bit. If I were to pick one of them, returning to the boss that slayed me would be a fool's errand.
Rogue Legacy offers you freedom, but it doesn't truly believe in it. The path to success is a narrow and plain one, and it requires the player to discard the ancillary joys of this game in the process. There is something humming here, a life force of some sort in those glorious bags of gold, but it's poorly honed, and ultimately Rogue Legacy is something of a failure.
These coins serve as currency for a progression system, which I also consider a saving grace for roguelikes - a way for me to meaningfully evaluate my progress and improvement beyond a nebulous self-examination of "skill" - and in tandem, hours blew by in Rogue Legacy as I smashed and crashed everything in sight, amassing my fortune and unlocking new goodies. I have always been a fan of treasure-seeking and optional midbosses, and this game has both in spades.
Unfortunately, though this is presumably one of the valid, intended playstyles by the developers - especially for those like myself who are not amazing at these zippy bullet-spam indies, and need the various upgrades to have a solid chance - playing this way is setting yourself up for torture. A vast majority of the armor pieces, runes, and skill tree nodes are effectively worthless, as everything comes back to attack strength and your health and mana pools. The new classes you can unlock are largely terrible, usually coming with severely reduced survivability in exchange for their gimmick, and since your character is rerolled each death, you may find your selection of kin to be exclusively useless, or putting you at a vast disadvantage. In the late game, even with the ability of picking one of 6 possible descendants, I was regularly faced with no good option, and resigned myself to a quick death in order to try my luck again.
It wasn't until I had accumulated most every treasure in the game that I started to clean up the remaining bosses and trying to finish the story, and despite having high-level equipment and well over 100 levels to my name, distributed evenly among all the experience nodes, I was still woefully unprepared for the more difficult challenges. Barring impeccable precision and endurance, it's significantly more advantageous to the player to skip all of the goodies, instead just pouring your fortune into the essential stats and abstaining from unlocking the gimped classes. Every time I saw a Mage, Spellsword, Assassin, Spelunker (when not treasure-seeking), and especially the godforsaken [REDACTED], my heart sank a bit. If I were to pick one of them, returning to the boss that slayed me would be a fool's errand.
Rogue Legacy offers you freedom, but it doesn't truly believe in it. The path to success is a narrow and plain one, and it requires the player to discard the ancillary joys of this game in the process. There is something humming here, a life force of some sort in those glorious bags of gold, but it's poorly honed, and ultimately Rogue Legacy is something of a failure.