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.
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.
Bar none, the best game I have ever played with my friend Ralph. So far I have played three games with my friend Ralph.
I guess this was my first Roguelike? lite? light? idk! anyway this was quite good fun, especially good to play with my WIFE. I liked the overworld and zelda-y stuff!!!! the second area of the overworld sucked majorly so I did not enjoy that bit and it made me forget I had this game. Glad I finished it ! ! !! !
Pretty decent coop game, forgot i had it
legal
As I installed this game, I thought I was only installing a simple little Zelda-like roguelite with a limited scope, so I was very happily surprised to find that there's much more to the game. Not only do you do roguelite runs in about half a dozen dungeons with your typical randomized floors and rooms, but you also have a predefined overworld riddled with secrets to explore, a (very simplistic) town building portion, basic farming and there are so many upgrade merchants that the game even lets you upgrade how quickly you can dig holes with your shovel. Making runs to gather resources and then spend said resources on building and improving an HQ of some kind is about as much my jam as a game can get, so I can already say that I really enjoyed this one even though it's also the most obviously abandoned and unfinished game I've played in many years, at least a decade.
The basics are just Zelda. You run around in a top-down view and swing your sword. There's also a stamina system that doesn't really add or detract much and is just kinda there. You're given a quest to do something or other to ward of some evil god or whatever, and are let loose in the open world to find and complete the first dungeon. The open world functions just like a Zelda would with free roaming that is blocked off by paths you need certain tools to access, while beating up slimes, digging up hidden treasure and collecting stuff for that one guy in town that wants rare rocks. Then you enter the dungeon, which tells you that you're not allowed to bring any of the upgrade gems with you into it, like Rogue Legacy, and then you explore three floors in order to make it to the boss while grinding up as many gems as you can find so you can upgrade everything from base damage to crit chance to stamina to, like I said, even how fast your shovel is, how bright your lantern shines and the blast radius of your bombs.
The game is clearly made with love and thought, because there are many little ideas and systems that elevate the whole experience, like how the dungeons just flat-out tell you when you've done everything in a room so that you don't waste time looking for secrets that aren't there, but it's also over-engineered in some areas and so obviously abandoned in others. There are just too many items to find and I don't see a reason for why we needed a second magic wand that's used like twice, instead of making that ability a spell for the wand you already have and have also only used like twice. I used the boomerang exactly once, to pick up a power thing that was hovering over a lava lake. There's like a dozen classes I never ended up using because they all seemed very samey and the game was over before I had even fully upgraded the starting class.
Strangest of all is that the world is just so littered with ideas that were obviously abandoned and never amounted to anything, like the statues that really look, graphically and geographically, like they're meant to do something but do not, or how about the dungeon entrance in the southwest that just never got a dungeon? Some reports on Reddit say you could enter it and find an empty room, but my game won't even let me enter the dungeon even though you can find a key for it. The endgame is bizarrely uninspired compared to the rest of the game and you can really feel how much the developers had just completely given up. The final dungeon added to the game, Fish Dungeon, is a woefully unfinished mess with one of the worst bosses I've ever seen. They didn't even come up with a name; it's just "Fish Dungeon" when the other themed dungeons got made-up fantasy names. The weirdest part is how the very final dungeon lets you fight the boss right off the bat, skipping the entire dungeon, and I didn't even notice that there was a dungeon the first time I beat the game. I went back because I spotted chests beyond the boss portal and I wanted to see what was there, only to find that there's a whole-ass dungeon that you don't even have to play because the game just gives up on itself and stops caring. There are also traces of a crafting system that never really happened, as every enemy can drop a resource that you can only use for a few potions that are unnecessary (I never brewed any but the health one), or sell them to a merchant. Farming never really amounts to anything either, primarily because they forgot that your planted crops need to drop seeds for the farming system to be any fun, but also because they can only be sold for gold that isn't really useful for anything in particular. It lets you open potion-brewing station in dungeons that you probably won't need since the game is quite easy, or buy furniture for your house that is limited in both scope and price. I finished with 2000 gold in my pocket and nothing to spend it on. I also finished with only half of the land plots in my town filled, as there are only so many shops (though there are quite a few) and the developers just gave up on adding more palette swap NPCs to fill the town out with, which seems to have been the idea. Instead you just build kind of a ghost town.
All of that said, I do have to say that I did not have a very glitchy experience like so many other reviewers did. The Fish Dungeon had really bad pathing and was annoying to play, one time I was riding the frog that lets you surf mud and the game kind of freaked out and threw me into an area I wasn't supposed to go to (but then recovered nicely by phasing me through trees I wasn't supposed to walk through and everything was fine; in fact, it ended up being a convenient shortcut) and the rock monsters in the infinite gem-grinding endgame dungeon clearly shouldn't be there as their spawn animation glitches them into walls all the time. I only made like five total runs in that dungeon and the rock monsters ruined two of those with their busted spawning. That's about it, though. I never had any gamebreaking issues, just disappointment issues regarding the sad state that this game was abandoned in. So close to the finish line yet so far.
There's about 75% of a fantastic game here. I absolutely love making resource runs in dungeons, coming out and building some new houses for my NPC residents, finding collectibles for them, tinkering with dozens upon dozens of various upgrades that I thought were fun and satisfying to acquire as you're allowed to be pretty strong, to the point where the final boss was joke easy with maxed stats, and maybe doing some light farming or fishing for variation, but the further I got through the game, the more it started to fall apart and become less and less fun, with the endgame being pretty dreadful and disappointing. I've seen games run out of budget before, and I've seen leftover pieces that never amounted to anything, but I've never seen a game scream so loudly that the developers just stopped caring, which in turn forces the player to stop caring as well. Makes you wonder if they ended up having a falling out and only ended up finishing their contractual obligations to Team17, or maybe Team17 was a pain to work with. Whatever the case may be, it's a real shame that a game that got off to such a strong start ended up being abandoned, ignored and unfinished.
The basics are just Zelda. You run around in a top-down view and swing your sword. There's also a stamina system that doesn't really add or detract much and is just kinda there. You're given a quest to do something or other to ward of some evil god or whatever, and are let loose in the open world to find and complete the first dungeon. The open world functions just like a Zelda would with free roaming that is blocked off by paths you need certain tools to access, while beating up slimes, digging up hidden treasure and collecting stuff for that one guy in town that wants rare rocks. Then you enter the dungeon, which tells you that you're not allowed to bring any of the upgrade gems with you into it, like Rogue Legacy, and then you explore three floors in order to make it to the boss while grinding up as many gems as you can find so you can upgrade everything from base damage to crit chance to stamina to, like I said, even how fast your shovel is, how bright your lantern shines and the blast radius of your bombs.
The game is clearly made with love and thought, because there are many little ideas and systems that elevate the whole experience, like how the dungeons just flat-out tell you when you've done everything in a room so that you don't waste time looking for secrets that aren't there, but it's also over-engineered in some areas and so obviously abandoned in others. There are just too many items to find and I don't see a reason for why we needed a second magic wand that's used like twice, instead of making that ability a spell for the wand you already have and have also only used like twice. I used the boomerang exactly once, to pick up a power thing that was hovering over a lava lake. There's like a dozen classes I never ended up using because they all seemed very samey and the game was over before I had even fully upgraded the starting class.
Strangest of all is that the world is just so littered with ideas that were obviously abandoned and never amounted to anything, like the statues that really look, graphically and geographically, like they're meant to do something but do not, or how about the dungeon entrance in the southwest that just never got a dungeon? Some reports on Reddit say you could enter it and find an empty room, but my game won't even let me enter the dungeon even though you can find a key for it. The endgame is bizarrely uninspired compared to the rest of the game and you can really feel how much the developers had just completely given up. The final dungeon added to the game, Fish Dungeon, is a woefully unfinished mess with one of the worst bosses I've ever seen. They didn't even come up with a name; it's just "Fish Dungeon" when the other themed dungeons got made-up fantasy names. The weirdest part is how the very final dungeon lets you fight the boss right off the bat, skipping the entire dungeon, and I didn't even notice that there was a dungeon the first time I beat the game. I went back because I spotted chests beyond the boss portal and I wanted to see what was there, only to find that there's a whole-ass dungeon that you don't even have to play because the game just gives up on itself and stops caring. There are also traces of a crafting system that never really happened, as every enemy can drop a resource that you can only use for a few potions that are unnecessary (I never brewed any but the health one), or sell them to a merchant. Farming never really amounts to anything either, primarily because they forgot that your planted crops need to drop seeds for the farming system to be any fun, but also because they can only be sold for gold that isn't really useful for anything in particular. It lets you open potion-brewing station in dungeons that you probably won't need since the game is quite easy, or buy furniture for your house that is limited in both scope and price. I finished with 2000 gold in my pocket and nothing to spend it on. I also finished with only half of the land plots in my town filled, as there are only so many shops (though there are quite a few) and the developers just gave up on adding more palette swap NPCs to fill the town out with, which seems to have been the idea. Instead you just build kind of a ghost town.
All of that said, I do have to say that I did not have a very glitchy experience like so many other reviewers did. The Fish Dungeon had really bad pathing and was annoying to play, one time I was riding the frog that lets you surf mud and the game kind of freaked out and threw me into an area I wasn't supposed to go to (but then recovered nicely by phasing me through trees I wasn't supposed to walk through and everything was fine; in fact, it ended up being a convenient shortcut) and the rock monsters in the infinite gem-grinding endgame dungeon clearly shouldn't be there as their spawn animation glitches them into walls all the time. I only made like five total runs in that dungeon and the rock monsters ruined two of those with their busted spawning. That's about it, though. I never had any gamebreaking issues, just disappointment issues regarding the sad state that this game was abandoned in. So close to the finish line yet so far.
There's about 75% of a fantastic game here. I absolutely love making resource runs in dungeons, coming out and building some new houses for my NPC residents, finding collectibles for them, tinkering with dozens upon dozens of various upgrades that I thought were fun and satisfying to acquire as you're allowed to be pretty strong, to the point where the final boss was joke easy with maxed stats, and maybe doing some light farming or fishing for variation, but the further I got through the game, the more it started to fall apart and become less and less fun, with the endgame being pretty dreadful and disappointing. I've seen games run out of budget before, and I've seen leftover pieces that never amounted to anything, but I've never seen a game scream so loudly that the developers just stopped caring, which in turn forces the player to stop caring as well. Makes you wonder if they ended up having a falling out and only ended up finishing their contractual obligations to Team17, or maybe Team17 was a pain to work with. Whatever the case may be, it's a real shame that a game that got off to such a strong start ended up being abandoned, ignored and unfinished.
This game is currently in the Humble Choice for April 2022, this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before May 3rd, 2022, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.
A blatant Zelda Roguelite.
Once again we have a fresh take on a Nintendo franchise. The Legend of Zelda Link to the Past is a classic title, and Rogue Heroes takes inspiration from it, perhaps too much. I'm a little shocked this was released on the Nintendo Switch instead of getting a Cease and Desist letter with how much it’s taken from the Zelda formula and style. But if Nintendo is ok with it, great.
Rogue Heroes takes that Zelda formula and increases the challenge to the point where it’s almost impossible to beat the game in a single run, but that’s the point of a rogue-lite, repetition. Here you’ll build a village, buy upgrades, and unlock different abilities. It’s also not just a dungeon. While the four dungeons are set up as the core of the games, there’s a large overworld, a story with different quests, and a town that will be built up as part of your upgrades.
Pick this up if you’re a fan of Zelda and rogue-lites. I’m torn on this, rogue-lites have a tendency to be brutally hard at some points and there are hints this game will go that route, but fans say it’s pretty reasonable in the difficulty. Also, it has online and couch co-op so if you have someone you want to check this game out with, that’s supposed to be worth trying.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/FeCvVH50kas
A blatant Zelda Roguelite.
Once again we have a fresh take on a Nintendo franchise. The Legend of Zelda Link to the Past is a classic title, and Rogue Heroes takes inspiration from it, perhaps too much. I'm a little shocked this was released on the Nintendo Switch instead of getting a Cease and Desist letter with how much it’s taken from the Zelda formula and style. But if Nintendo is ok with it, great.
Rogue Heroes takes that Zelda formula and increases the challenge to the point where it’s almost impossible to beat the game in a single run, but that’s the point of a rogue-lite, repetition. Here you’ll build a village, buy upgrades, and unlock different abilities. It’s also not just a dungeon. While the four dungeons are set up as the core of the games, there’s a large overworld, a story with different quests, and a town that will be built up as part of your upgrades.
Pick this up if you’re a fan of Zelda and rogue-lites. I’m torn on this, rogue-lites have a tendency to be brutally hard at some points and there are hints this game will go that route, but fans say it’s pretty reasonable in the difficulty. Also, it has online and couch co-op so if you have someone you want to check this game out with, that’s supposed to be worth trying.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/FeCvVH50kas
Es divertido si vas a jugar en compañía, pero me da la sensación de que en solitario puede hacerse un poco monótono.
Por lo demás, genial. Muchas vibes a A Link to the Past, que siempre es bueno.
Por lo demás, genial. Muchas vibes a A Link to the Past, que siempre es bueno.
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.
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.
Great with friends. Big Zelda vibes.
fire with friends but the bugs def harm the experience. should be way more popular than it is
It need a little polish, plus some balancing for the latter half of the game. But otherwise, it was a fun, short playthrough with enjoyable LttP vibes.
The roguelike parts of the game (the actual dungeons) were way weaker than the premade overworld. The developers should have honestly just stuck with making a Zelda clone, because they could have made a darn good one.
this is a fun concept, but it just doesn't really function. the balancing is awful, the rogue-lite elements feel poorly implemented (dungeons are really uninteresting) and the upgrade system is incredibly incremental and not at all satisfying. combine that with a ton of co-op frustrations like game breaking bugs/annoying revive system that leaves friends sitting there for like 30 minutes at a time and you get a real mess of a game. it feels like it should have been a home run but it just falls short everywhere.
First off, let me just say that this game is a complete and total ripoff of Link to the Past, but with rogue-lite elements, slightly more action-based combat, and coop. You go to four dungeons, use tools like hookshots, boomerangs, bombs, and your sword to dive deeper into dungeons to face a boss, with the reward being a fancy doodad. Collect four, fight the boss, win the game. With that out of the way, I definitely had a good time with Rogue Heroes.
I played through the entire thing with a buddy, and we had a lot of fun. The game actually gets quite easy after a few upgrades, but it was never so easy that we could sleepwalk through it. Regular enemies are harder than the bosses. Also there’s no point to use any of the classes except the Rogue.
But the sense of progression, general gameplay, and coop shenanigans are very enjoyable. If you’re looking for a cheap coop game with a friend or three, Rogue Heroes is that. There’s also a free demo.
Also, fuck snakes.
I played through the entire thing with a buddy, and we had a lot of fun. The game actually gets quite easy after a few upgrades, but it was never so easy that we could sleepwalk through it. Regular enemies are harder than the bosses. Also there’s no point to use any of the classes except the Rogue.
But the sense of progression, general gameplay, and coop shenanigans are very enjoyable. If you’re looking for a cheap coop game with a friend or three, Rogue Heroes is that. There’s also a free demo.
Also, fuck snakes.