Rogue Legacy is something of a classic at this point, being one of the early takes on the “rogue-lite” style of game that is so popular nowadays. It came out just 2 years after Binding of Isaac and a year after FTL, 2 of the games that were a big influence in the subgenre/style/whatever you want to call it. Rogue Legacy was a good time that did a bunch of interesting stuff.

Well, let’s go and see if the sequel retains what made the first one good!

Developer: Clover Bite
Publisher: Akupara Games
Release date: August 2, 2021
Platforms: PC (I think other platforms later?)
Genre: Roguelite

Review

So there’s not really a story here. There’s LORE. Which continues to be a shitty way to tell stories. The basic idea is that you want to go through this dungeon because the king asked you, and you beat bosses, who protect the door in the entryway of the dungeon, which leads to some treasure or whatever. But then you die, because you will die (unless you’re really good and you speedrun the game). So your ancestor will do the job for you… or the next ancestor… Or maybe 50 ancestors later.

Each ancestor has some differences, as you get 3 to choose from after you die. Each choice will be a randomized class, may have a randomized relic, and may have a randomized trait. Classes have a basic stat change (stuff like some are low health but hit harder, or are better with magic, and stuff like that), a basic talent, and a basic weapon they start with (and maybe a magic spell, not sure if that’s random or if each class has one, never really paid attention). Some traits are disabilities that change your gameplay, some do literally nothing, and some may buff you up in some ways. For example, being a pacificist starts you with a protest sign that does nothing (something something metaphor), but because it’s such a big nerf, it gives you +90% gold gain (and you keep that gold gain if you manage to find a real weapon). Or you may have IBS, which replaces your talent with a poisonous fart. Or you may have a variety of visual disabilities that mess with how you see things (different colors). Or you may be a diva which puts a spotlight on you (and makes it nearly impossible to see anything else). There are a lot of these traits. Some are good, some are really bad and make the game basically unplayable (vertigo, for example, makes the screen upside-down. And relics are items you generally find around in the dungeon, more on that later.

Before going into the dungeon, there’s this little port area. It has a blacksmith, who can make new weapons and armors (note: even if he only makes swords, whatever upgrade he does applies to all weapon types). There’s a fortune teller lady or something that sells runes. Both runes and weapons have a weight limit each. There’s a dude that you can pay to lock the dungeon to its previous state. There’s a house that has guys that sell certain upgrades, as well as a sidequest kinda guy who gives you hints of things to find/do in the dungeon, which unlocks challenge fights (winning enough of these gives you the resources for the upgrades). And then you find Charon, you just give him all the gold you have (though some percentage can go into a safe if you upgrade that) and he brings you to the dungeon.

But even before that, there’s a screen where you build up the castle. It’s a big grid of squares, where if you unlock one square, you open up adjacent squares. Most squares can be upgraded more than once for further upgrades. Some of these are fairly straightforward things like stat boosts, others may upgrade the facilities in some way (like allowing for more weight limits), and you unlock some classes here too. Each upgrade starts costing more and more gold though, so eventually, you do need to get a ton of gold for only one or two upgrades. It’s basically the same system the first game had, though this one is upgraded partly through that house with the challenge battles.

In the dungeon, it’s very similar to the first game. This is a side-scrolling, Metroid-inspired platformer, but the dungeon changes at the start of a run (though, like the first game, each area is basically in the same basic “place” in the map… so the randomly-generated area is a bit limited still, it was the same with the first game). Each area has a trial for an heirloom relic, which gives you permanent movement option upgrades (stuff like air dashing and double jumping and being able to dash through voids and jumping off certain things). There are a bunch of enemies, a lot of which are taken from the previous game. Some may have ranged attacks, some will largely fail at trying to attack you (enemies have pretty limited AI so they’re not great at fighting you 1v1). If there are enough enemies, it can be a bit rough to deal with them. You have talents and magic that help deal with enemies, and you may sometimes find new weapons (and talent, and magic) that might be better. You can also jump kick, which is similar to pogo jumping in DuckTales where you bounce off things and cause damage (or I guess a more modern comparison would be the down-slash in Hollow Knight). Killing enemies gives you coins, as does breaking random objects and opening chests. Chests can also contain new runes, or blueprints for weapons/armor.  There’s gonna be special rooms with teleporters, boss doors, and relics. The boss battles are great, I won’t even talk about them much. The normal enemies tend to be fairly fun to deal with. And with all these heirlooms, there’s some interesting platforming. Really the only problem I can talk about here is the fact that you’ll see every possible room in every area very quickly, so there’s a lot of doing the same thing over and over eventually.

The relics are basically upgrades to your power, may it be attack upgrades, boosts based on certain conditions (like if your health is low… or high), extra blinking time when you get hit and various other things. My one problem with the relics is that they require Resolve. Resolve is a weird, stupid system where, if you’re wearing less heavy equipment, you get more of (minimum will be 150%). Relics cost an amount of resolve when you pick them up. These costs are going to be from ~24 to ~50. So if you start with 150% (which you might want to if the best armor you have access to is heavy), you’ll be lucky if you can equip 2 relics. I mean, you CAN equip more, but if your resolve drops below 100%, your max HP drops by that percentage. So basically, you kinda won’t want that resolve to drop much lower than ~90%. I fucking hate the resolve system. It’s weird because I like those sorts of risk-and-reward mechanics, but in this game especially, you will need that HP, because enemies hit like trucks, even when you have lots of defense.

Oh, a cool thing about weapons… so in the first game, there was just one weapon. The sword. Which was fine. But it also lacked variety. Here each class gets their own weapon (as mentioned below), and there are a few other weapons (some of which are different versions of the base weapons). Swords, daggers, spears, axes (I hate the axes, that air spin attack is so unwieldy), boxing gloves, frying pans (actually not bad because they cause fire damage), ladles, pizzas, scythes, several magic staves, guitars (these are really weird, you’re meant to place floating notes in the air and jump kick them to cause AOE damage)… and probably a few others I’m not thinking about right now. It’s really cool that they added some good weapon variety here.

And there’s plenty of replay value if you’re not tired of the gameplay after finishing the game once. Namely, you can reset time and restart the dungeon from the beginning, but with things like making enemies stronger. So you can find more new equipment, power up your castle more, and maybe figure out some of these secrets you missed the first time through. Specifically, there’s a bunch of bosses I didn’t fight (and the game teases you by showing all enemies in the game, but with question marks for any you haven’t seen). If you want to spend a lot of time on this game, you can.

Overall

This was fun. In a way, it kinda feels like just playing through the original again, but it’s a bit more in-depth than the original. There are actual weapons that function differently, so the different classes actually feel a bit more different than the first. There are more bosses as some bosses have mini-bosses protecting their doors. There are overall more systems that I barely experimented with but the replayability of it (if you’re not tired of it by the end) means a lot of it is still worth doing. It’s just really well done.

It’s not VERY different from the first, but it’s different enough to be more than worth playing even if you did beat that first game.

I’ll recommend this. I’d even probably recommend it over the first.