Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth–1980, gross, imagine being that old–there was a game called Rogue. Players would explore a randomly generated dungeon, fight monsters, and look for treasure with the ominous prospect of permadeath hanging over them. The irony of using the term “roguelike” as a descriptor is that many of the players that love “roguelikes” probably never encountered Rogue in the wild, as they had yet to be born. It’s the same reason The Youths wonder what the hell the square icon we use to represent “Save” means, right?
Nonetheless, “roguelike” has become the term of choice for RPG-style games with randomly-generated dungeons and, usually, the term implies permadeath and a certain level of kick-in-your teeth difficulty. Rogue Legacy 2 is one of those, with several twists: Your runs are randomized and the characters change over time, but there are also persistent upgrades you can buy or acquire. You can also upgrade the family estate with various buildings that help future heirs start off stronger or better armored or able to carry more. So your runs start off difficult, but your base character gets stronger or better off or has more classes or has more armor as you grind your family into a rich and flavorful paste.
I’ll stop here for a moment since those who played Rogue Legacy probably just want to know the new stuff. So, here we go: They’ve moved to a 2.5D style with 3D characters over hand-drawn backdrops. Each class has unique weapons. Biome generation has been redone. You can find Heirloom items in your dungeon crawls that permanently grant abilities. Being communist Canadians, they’ve integrated Universal Healthcare, where the more debilitating the trait, the better the reward. Overall, they’ve made it more accessible, added more stuff, and even added more clowns.
So, I mentioned Traits above: Each child of the bloodline is unique, which means they may have a different class and different abilities, but they may also have different Traits, which can be disabilities or hindrances…but may also play out in surprising ways. So they may have Dwarfism and be very small, but that would let them sneak through passages others can’t use. Or they may have hypogonadism, which grants knockback powers.
Some traits are purely aesthetic, like turning everything into an 8-bit world or turning the whole screen upside down. And some are active gameplay hindrances, like narrowing down your vision, making you weaker, or giving you fewer hitpoints. However, like I said above, the more Hindered you are, the more gold you find…so it may be to your advantage to take the weakest character on the screen rather than the strongest. And worst of all, one trait is being a tree-hugging hippie pacifist. Gross.
I will say upfront that normally I dislike games where you have to repeat the same thing over and over again and call it “gameplay.” In this case, though, it works extremely well: Since you can earn enough gold for upgrades or find cool loot, it’s not always a huge setback when you get killed. And most of the attacks are blockable in one way or the other. Losing is fun, death is expected, and you don’t really lose that much. It’s also rewarding to find yourself plowing through enemies after a nice upgrade to your abilities, or learning how to cheese the simple but extremely rewarding combat.
Every time I died, I felt like I knew what I needed to do to get better. Maybe that was “get better at jumping” or “buy more armor” or “Have the reflexes of a 20-year-old,” and that’s fine. The problem was solvable. It wasn’t the game designer trying to style on me to get themselves off. Instead, the game itself was telling me to git gud, which is fair.
As a caveat, this is an Early Access build. Some of the biomes weren’t ready yet, so the content is fairly limited. And there are obviously bugs to be worked out. For me, though, Rogue Legacy 2 is already more solid in Early Access than a lot of games are at release. If only there weren’t so many damn clowns…
