I'm not going to lie, this game looks and sound so incredibly generic due to the lack of personality it has but the more you play the more you realize just how unique it is.
More often than not, the reaction to every new thing/mechanic we discover that this game has to offer is "wait what? holy shit that's genuinely so cool". Like for example there's this item that's a grappling hook that's primarily function is to help you grapple certain points, but you can use it to steal shields from enemies.

The overworld is full of secrets and shit to discover and doing it with friends is just really fun.

It kinda makes me sad that a game like this has a name and personality so [i]forgettable[/i] and [i]uninteresting[/i]. The quests are generic, the characters, story and lore are just forgettable, but the actual content and gameplay side of things is where this game truly shines and when it shines, it really does.

It is definitely one of those games that require a little bit of patience to fully enjoy, but an experience definitely worth playing for the gameplay alone.

Fast told me about this a week or so before it came out, and he described it as Link to the Past but a 4-player co-op rogue-lite, and I checked out the demo and was basically instantly sold. This is the first game I've pre-ordered in who knows how long (it came with some extra goodies if you preordered), and I think it turned out to be worth my $20. This game has been out on Early Access on Steam for quite some time, but only a couple weeks ago did it finally launch on Switch (I beat within the first week it was out). I never had any friends to play it with, but even still I managed to beat it in about 9.5 hours, and then spent another hour and a half or so in the post-game trying to (unsuccessfully) unlock more stuff.

The land of Tasos was long ago ravaged by evil Titans, but the four goddesses waged a war against them to seal them away forever. It once a beautiful land of magic and prosperity, but the greedy ambitions of the foreigners who found it led it to ruin. Pushing the native people to the wilderness and vastly exploiting its natural resources, the magic that sealed the Titans begins to wain, and monsters slowly begin to return to Tasos as the Titans prepare for their cataclysmic return. That's where you the hero(s) come in. An avatar chosen by the goddesses, you've been sent to slay the Titans and save Tasos!

The story is almost 100% in the opening movie (in a sequence very reminiscent of Zelda games like Minish Cap or LTTP), and the themes it seems to present (the damaging effect of things like colonialism and environmental destruction) are almost entirely absent from the dialogue that is actually in the game. I'm not sure if they set that up as a joke, some kind of homage to back when games had just about all their story in the opening movie, but just how disconnected from the actual game was a bit disappointing. The game's story itself is honestly just about as simple as "you're a hero who needs to save the land from the slumbering (but soon to wake) evil", and while there's some quirky and at times entertaining dialogue, it's all super forgettable. It's serviceable for delivering you the action at hand, but they should've probably ditched the notions of wider themes if they were going to just ignore them so brashly.

The gameplay is more or less as Fast originally described it to me. You have a curated overworld with a town in the center of it. All of that is pre-built, and has loads of little secret caves and secrets to find special goodies. Around the world are four dungeons that you'll need to get through to kill four bosses to unlock the final dungeon that houses the Titans. These dungeons are fitted with three floors each, and each floor is procedurally made of pre-made rooms that have enemies, treasure, and traps in them. On the third floor waits a boss, and they're pretty darn good fights.

The overall construction of the game is really solid. The overworld is fun, and the mini-quests to unlock dungeons feel like proper Zelda ones. There are even some hidden dungeons you can do to unlock new classes and such. The dungeon rooms are also well designed, and the combat feels punishing but never super unfair (granted I've played a ton of games in this 2D Zelda style, so my experience in the genre might give me some bias there). There are several classes you can pick from as well, with each having their own base stat multipliers (for attack, defense, and speed) as well as a mobility move. They all fight pretty similarly with a sword, and the mobility moves often aren't suuuper different from each other, but the changes between them make them feel different enough that you'll likely find a favorite among the bunch (my favorite was Reaper).

In the overworld you find (admittedly almost useless) coin money, but in dungeons you find gems, and these are SUPER important. You use gems for everything from building and upgrading buildings in your town to upgrading the stats of your base weapons as well as the extra tools you get (like your bow, bombs, etc). However, you lose all your gems when you enter a dungeon, so it behooves you to spend them and not horde them. Most of the hidden caves and treasures around the overworld contain little orbs that make you lose slightly less gems when entering a dungeon, but you'd probably have spent just about all you possibly could anyhow, so these collectibles feel really uncompelling to go out of your way to grab (they may as well do literally nothing). This is where my complaints with the generally unpolished nature of the game come out.

Sure, you can upgrade your gear, but weirdly for a rogue-lite, you can get way too powerful way too fast. Even with just the gems I got from doing the 2nd dungeon, I was monstrously powerful in the 3rd dungeon to the point I killed its boss in only a few seconds, and much the same sort of situation repeated in the 4th dungeon. Some kind of cap on how far you can upgrade that extends when you beat a new big dungeon would've really given the game some much needed difficulty balancing, as it starts out pretty darn difficult but then gets way easier really fast as you get more health and higher damage. These balancing issues extend to the enemies as well, as while they're pretty well designed, there aren't many of them. Once you learn how to deal with the enemies in the first dungeon, you'll probably be able to dispatch them no matter how tough they are. Enemies from dungeon to dungeon are just higher level, and there's a pretty low actual diversity of enemies, so just having learned how the limited number of enemies fight also makes the game much easier after you beat the first dungeon or so.

The game's admittedly quite cool concept also results in some fairly lackluster dungeon design when compared to a proper game in the genre. Because they're pre-made rooms put together procedurally, puzzles only exist within rooms. No multi-room puzzles exist of any kind because that would require some much more stiff procedural generation to the point you may as well just make a non-rogue-lite game, and it ends up making the dungeons lack any kind of identity between them. There are some traps exclusive to each of the four dungeons, sure, but I think it's telling that the final dungeon is just a collage of all the other fours' room types and they barely feel out of place next to each other.

The importance of gems and the similarity of the classes also makes actually exploring the overworld not that compelling. The orbs are almost useless, and all money does is just unlock special chests in dungeons that get you a big boost of gems. Granted exploring the overworld is pretty fun because it's well designed, you're really exploring just for the sake of doing it, as any extra classes you unlock are done through pretty darn well signposted side quests that take place in or around the main town. Yet that's contrasted with some really poorly signposted areas and some really cruddy quest design (there are a few areas I just never figured out how to get to, and the Pirate class I never unlocked because it involves spending AGES doing a really boring fishing mini-game for several randomly spawning legendary fish). None of this stuff is experience ruining, but it adds up to consistently annoying problems that will be present just about your entire experience.

The presentation is a resounding "okay." The game doesn't have much music, with tons of outdoor areas being just ambient sound, and what music is there isn't really memorable or noticeable beyond simple atmosphere. The graphics are pretty darn good pixel-art, but like how Cathedral (another recent Switch game) apes far too much from Shovel Knight's style to be all that memorable itself, Rogue Heroes does the same with Link to the Past. They crib from that game's style a TON, and while it IS good, it's a very good imitation and it never really feels like anything more than that with the fairly generic enemy design.

The game is mostly bug-free, although there is a bug I ran into a couple times where the game didn't realize that I'd changed planes I was on. This only happened two or three times, but I'd jump down from a ledge but I was walking over enemies and pick-ups because the game thought I was still above where I was. It's pretty easily solved by jumping down/up another ledge or changing screens, but it was a very noticeable bug I felt I had to point out. Apparently the game was pretty routinely criticized for being buggy during Early Access on PC, so the fact that the Switch release works as well as it does is definitely something worth commending in my mind.

Verdict: Recommended. Despite all its faults and how generic it is, Rogue Heroes is still an incredibly competent game at its core. It provides a really solid experience in a genre (Zelda-like rogue-lite) that I don't really know of anything else tackling, and I imagine it's quite a good time with friends. I think a lot of people are better off waiting for a sale, especially if you either don't have friends to play with or aren't much of a fan of the genre, but this is still a good experience that I don't feel I wasted my money on.