Dizzy Rogues is, more than anything, elegant. One-handed gaming at its finest. Despite being short, the game's brevity only enhances its appeal. Its simplicity—moving around and using your ability in a top-down world are your only two actions—only enhancing its complexity.
Your little animal spins and holds its weapon out, and only changes direction once hitting something with it. Rather than, as the name would imply, dizzying, the whole thing is smooth, and purposeful.
In early levels, enemies just stand still and rotate their weapons or shields (following the same rules you do), but, as you progress, their mechanics become a bit move involved. Flies start moving towards you, crabs move, and swing two weapons. Later on, the shadowy figures need to expose their hitboxes for you to deal damage. The goal is to internalize their behaviors, understand when to get in and pull away, when to bounce your weapon in objects to change its direction, and when to use your skills (a dash, a rotation speedup, a range extender, or a parry) to your advantage.
Reaching the end of a level in Dizzy Rogues grants you a little shop area where you use the currency you gain by killing enemies, maintaining combos, and cutting grass, to buy upgrades. And it’s just one step away from incredible. The incredibleness is lost not in the shop itself, but the fact that it also lets you heal to full health every time. Being able to start every section on full health removes a lot of the tension getting into a new world would otherwise have. It cheapens the experience a little bit, especially for more skillful players. There’s a challenge which makes you not use it, and a better player can just skip it entirely, but its presence sours me a little bit.
Oh, but the shop. Use your money you collect from being proficient, and buy items that actually reward you for being proficient! Most items you buy don’t do anything by themselves, but actually activate once you reach a certain combo (which requires you to be proactive in your fights without taking damage)—it pushes newer players to be more aggressive and engage more with the mechanics, while making good players more equipped to swiftly deal with enemies in a fun and stylish way.
If you’re unskilled, inattentive, or don’t care too much, you lose. If you’re patient, and understand the rhythm of it all, you’ll be given a great feeling game.
Dizzy Rogues is minimalist game design in its purest form. It rewards finesse over brute force or luck. While it requires only one hand, the other will be squarely planted in your desk—lest you lose your focus—at least while you’re learning the patterns. Once you do, you win, and leave quickly and very satisfied.
