Rogue Legacy 2

Rating: 4/10 – A Legacy Better Left Behind While Rogue Legacy 2 is undoubtedly a visual and mechanical improvement over its predecessor, it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own demands. What begins as a promising and charming roguelite quickly devolves into a punishing gauntlet of precision platforming that feels more like a skill test than an actual game. The first few areas strike a good balance between exploration and challenge, but after the second boss, things take a sharp and frustrating turn. Suddenly, the game expects you to chain together absurd sequences of dashes, jumps, spins, and damage-boosts with pinpoint accuracy—think Celeste but without the tight controls or singular focus. You’ll find yourself forced to do things like four dashes, three mid-air maneuvers, hit an enemy mid-flight just to reset your jump, and then repeat that entire ballet 30 more times to reach a chest or complete a challenge room. One mistake, and you’re back to square one. What once felt like a quirky, death-has-consequences RPG becomes a platforming purgatory. It stops being about exploration or growth and turns into an exhausting trial-and-error simulator. If you’re here for fluid combat, progression, or world-building, be prepared to be derailed by a skill curve that spikes into the stratosphere. It’s a shame, because Rogue Legacy 2 has so much going for it. But all of its charm gets buried under a design philosophy that mistakes complexity for depth and punishment for challenge.

I have to say, I much more preferred the previous game from Cellar Door Games (Full Metal Furies). This is not a standard roguetype game, so I first need to describe its structure. The game consists of one big world with multiple different areas (each with different themes). A run begins in the first area but you can go in any area you want (as long as you have unlocked certain abilities which will happen eventually). Each area contains a boss and the goal of the game is to defeat all bosses. So a run consists in exploring the world in order to become stronger by collecting some upgrades (which apply only for the run) while you also collect money along the way, and then trying a boss in a chosen area. If you succeed you can continue the exploration (and try to beat another boss!) or you are sent back to the main hub. Every time a boss is defeated, the boss is defeated forever. Defeating all bosses took me 30 hours (I’m an average player so it may be faster or longer for you) and a lot of runs. The main hub is where you will be able to purchase permanent upgrades with the money you collected. This is mandatory since some areas and bosses are designed to be harder so you need to be stronger too. This is the first thing I didn’t like about this game. The upgrade system is confusing. The total number of upgrades you can do is limited because every upgrade you buy makes the next one more expensive until it becomes very expensive (newgame+ is where it is possible to purchase new upgrades again). From a game design point of view, this makes sense (otherwise the game would become a matter of farming until the bosses are trivialized), but it is not at all clear what should be bought in priority. The second thing is the difficulty. This game is damn hard. I’m overall ok with difficulty in games (celeste, super meat boy, hollow knight, etc) and enjoy these games as long as they don’t cross an upper limit (spelunky 2). Rogue Legacy 2 is at the exact limit, it is sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating. The bosses are truly difficult (otherwise the game would be completed too quickly). In any other non-rogue game, that would be ok, since you would be able to retry instantly until you defeat the boss. However, here, things are different. You have either two choices. Either explore the map to get a few upgrades (that don’t help much anyway except for hp), lose a lot of time, try to beat a boss, or go straight for the boss without upgrades from exploration. In the first case, you do some boring exploration where you still need to be careful about your hp and hope you will be able to defeat the boss (so that the time spent exploring was not wasted). In the second case, you have zero upgrades from the exploration, but you can quickly retry a boss if you launch a new run (just rush to the boss room). The exploration is not really rewarding, it gives weak upgrades, the bosses are barely easier with these upgrades. The only point of exploration is the money you collect from the enemies and the treasures for the permanent upgrades. It is fun at first, but after a while it becomes boring. As you can see from these lines, I didn’t exactly have an enjoyable time from Rogue Legacy 2, though I pushed it to the end. Now to be exactly complete, I must precise that the developers have put in the options the possibility to tweak multiple parameters affecting the difficulty and also the option to reset the permanent upgrades (if you think you made mistakes). I’m not completely fond of that. I understand that it was done to help the player adjust the experience to its level but I still think it’s up to the developer to carefully balance his game. The player should not have to do the job of the game designer. Buy and play Full Metal Furies from the same studio, it’s way better : fun and reasonably difficult (and it's a coop game!)

So, I said to my nephew, "I really like it. But, who the f plays a game like this til they beat it 8 times?" I think I'm up to 5 or 6 times. Don't take my "hours played" seriously. I used to leave it running in the background. But I've gotta be 80 hours in at least.

Very underrated game. I have a love of platformers and roguelikes, so this was a wonderful combination of the two (Spelunky 2 is one of my favorite games as well, go figure). Gives immense replayability- I 100%'d it but could've kept going for quite a while more. The bad part of the game to me was the beginning, where you are learning all the bosses and biomes for the first time. To me, this process is usually the most fun part of a roguelike, but I found myself frustrated in this game and bounced off it for a while. Once you get that first clear under your belt, the game feels like it really opens up in the NG+ playthroughs.

Its not a bad game, but it has two really bad problems 1- All the upgrades that give new classes and facilities are too frontloaded meaning that you unlock them all within an hour then spend the rest of your playtime unlocking meaningless crap like +1 armor or +10 health. Theres nothing interesting to save up for 2- The game wants to challenge you with platforming as much as it does with combat. The problem is the platforming is so bad with the controls and giant character size that it just gets annoying

This is an easy contender for my favorite game ever; what a trip it's been from EA to NG+100. What appeals to me the most apart from the incredibly fluid combat system is the progression that actively rewards you varying your playstyle while leaving enough breathing room to pursue the one you enjoy the most. Fantastic graphics, superb challenge, great music, fun secrets, nice characters, and the most addictive gameplay loop I've ever experienced to this day. Also works phenomenally well on the Deck, even has a native Linux port. Something else to note is that the early access experience was stellar. Cellar Door Games delivered on time, every time, consistently high quality content and updates all the while having paid close attention to what feedback the community gave. We even got detailed patch notes and reasoning behind many of the changes along the way. I can not overstate enough how incredible of a game this is. If you like what you see and enjoy the idea of frequently switching up your playstyle as part of the progression then I wholly recommend it.

Rogue Legacy 2, a rogue like obviously, that fell pretty flat on its face for me. The moment to moment gameplay and presentation is fine. What really killed this one for me is the meta progression. I could go on about the ins and outs of how the meta progression is designed very purposefully to make you try new things, learn how weapons/classes work together and so on and so forth... but all that fell apart for me when I had to start grinding. You need to get some rather large sums of money to unlock small percent upgrades to health and damage. It is not fun grinding for these. And if you want these upgrades to be meaningful you'll need to get several of them, aka a LOT of grinding. You can attempt to just push forward through to the main goals, but it will get harder and harder until those upgrades become necessary. The devs tried to address this issue by adding a gold bonus to next level you have yet to beat, but that just means instead of doing a couple long runs on easy levels you are doing a ton of short runs on hard levels. In the end, its still a grind, and this game does not have a gripping enough combat system or story or any other hook that made me want to stick around and grind it out.

时隔两年发现自己当年没骂这游戏特来补骂，啥呗肝度，啥呗难度，一堆重复战斗内容被迫玩一辈子。吃大分去吧！

Eh.... It's a more polished version of Rogue Legacy, but more grindy and repetitive due to poorly designed upgrade scaling. It has two more biomes than the original game, but those two are very linear and they wear out their welcome quickly. The entire sidescrolling roguelite subgenre is aging badly. There are three more I plan to play in the future but after that I am DONE with this subgenre for good. I recommend playing summum aeterna instead of this if you really want a sidescrolling roguelite, its less grindy and even more fluid.