Review: Rogue Legacy (PC)

At this point, I think I've complained ad nauseum about my feelings regarding the use of "roguelike elements" in games where they don't necessarily improve the game or make it more interesting or engaging. Like throwing "RPG elements" like stat points and leveling up into AAA shoot 'em up games in the mistaken belief that somehow it makes the gameplay deeper, lots of indie devs seem obsessed with the idea that procedural generation and/or permadeath just magically make a game more enticing. According to most of the "roguelike-like" games I've played lately, that's just not true.

However, Rogue Legacy does it right. It does it so right, that about two attempts into the game I literally slapped myself on the forehead with exasperation over how obvious Rogue Legacy's approach to the genre is and how nobody (including me) had thought of it earlier.

It goes like this: 

1. Fun, Castlevania-y platforming and fighting
2. The expectation of eventual death
3. The ability to carry your loot out of the castle upon your death
4. The ability to regenerate as another hero with slightly different skills and disadvantages (the next "generation" of your adventurer family, hence the title Rogue Legacy)
5. The ability to spend your saved loot on boosting your skills/weapons/stats before your next playthough
6. The required forfeiture of all (or nearly all, later on in the game) of your loot before you try playing again (you literally pay a toll to Charon to enter the castle

What the hell does he do with all of that money, anyway?

It's bloody brilliant. It captures the essence of what's great about procedural generation (the thrill of learning the layout of a map so that you can survive better and then the challenge of having that advantage wiped away in an instant) and about sudden, frequent death (you're always working your way through the castle a little bit on tenterhooks) while allowing you to have the satisfaction of knowing that every playthrough is going to be worth something. Unless, I guess, you get whacked within seconds of entering the castle and exit with 20 gold pieces. I had playthroughs where I absolutely ripped through two entire zones of the castle and came out ready to buy ten new upgrades for my character, but those were few and far between. Yet, most playthroughs I gathered at least enough gold to buy one upgrade after my sudden and violent death, and that was enough of a sense of moving forward to keep me motivated to keep playing for the occasionally big reward of those longer runs. And that's the beauty of the game. Though you play through the same four dungeon "levels" over and over again, they're always different enough that you're forced to pay attention, and they're always going to give you some sort of reward, provided you don't absolutely biff it. 

In one fell swoop, the game does away with basically all my complaints about the roguelike genre.

But there's more. Each of your character's iterations has some randomly-assigned quirks that seem sort of goofy at first but prove to be important as you get more and more used to the game.* For example, dwarfism seems to just make your character funny-looking and small, but eventually you might realize that [SPOILER] your size allows you to access many secret rooms you couldn't otherwise reach, but that your weapon's attack range is much smaller, forcing you to get closer to enemies to attack [END SPOILER]. Each of your character is also assigned a class randomly, and the pool of available classes expands as you buy more upgrades.

Oh, and most of the in-game text is hilarious.

Each time you die, you get to choose from one of three possible successors. Oftentimes this choice allows you to choose a hero that best suits your needs for the next playthrough, but sometimes this choice gives you three terrible options and forces you to face the castle with whomever you deem the least bad option. This can make for some really interesting playthroughs. For instance, once I got stuck with a Spelunker and assumed his weak ass was going to get splattered all some spike traps by the second room of the castle. I gave it my best shot, though, and about a half hour later I died with an absurd amount of money in my wallet (?). Later on, as you unlock more classes, equipment, and things like the Architect, you can put a lot more forethought into your runs, not just choosing a character with the best abilities for what you want to accomplish, but also outfitting them with the best equipment and abilities. 

I ran into a few small annoyances later on in the game in the sense that at times it seemed like I was expected to grind for gold a bit longer than I would have liked. The castle itself is small enough and the enemies predictable enough that you can run through most of it after playing and upgrading for a few hours. But you have to beat a boss in each of the four interconnected "levels" before you can progress to the endgame, and this you cannot do without some serious leveling up. So there's a point at which the game's greatest strength becomes a sort of weakness as well, as you spend hour after hour running through nearly identical halls, slaying identical monsters for gold and slowly building stats from, say, level 2 to level 15 (out of a possible 75, for the truly masochistic). I managed to beat a few of the bosses on a lower level than I apparently should have been able to, just due to still having old-school Contra reflexes, and it was nice in a way to occasionally overcome the grind through what felt like sheer playing skill, but then there was one boss in particular that I had to spend 2-3 hours leveling before I could defeat it, so there's going to be a bit of grinding mid-game regardless of how good you are. 

It was him. This motherfucker.

And it's a little annoying once you realize that many of the rooms and traps are identical and the enemies in the harder levels are just bigger, stronger, faster versions of the enemies in the early levels. One of the early thrills in the game was learning enemy types, their patterns, and their weaknesses, so this bummed me out a little.

This wizard is just like the others, but the sprite it bigger and it's more killy!

That said, Rogue Legacy was awesome, and if I didn't have so many games in my queue right now, I'd be going back for New Game+ right away. The platforming and fighting itself feels almost perfect (moving horizontally always feels a little slidey to me for some reason), and so even when you're grinding at length the basic gameplay always stays fun in that repetitive-mindless-but-good way. And strategizing your character's build in the later game really adds a surprisingly deep layer of planning that I didn't expect from the game at first. Good times! 

The end!

* This isn't true of all the traits; for example, the one that makes you constantly fart loudly really has no point aside from FARTS which are FUNNY.